Travelling Through a Sea of Poppies: from the Geographical to the Cultural Frontier
Abstract
The paper focuses on the relation between the concepts of geographical and cultural frontiers, using Sea of Poppies (2008), Amitav Ghosh’s last novel, as a case study. Indeed, the journey of the ship Ibis from the Gulf of Bengal to the Mauritius islands provides the backdrop against which the theme of the crossing of religious, social and caste boundaries is developed: as the Ibis crosses the frontier which divides India from the Mauritius, the men and women on board, embodiments of both colonizing and colonized values, are subjected to a series of (religious, linguistic, social) negotiation processes. The aim of the paper will be to analyze some of these processes in order to show that in the novel negotiation and contamination become synonymic with cultural resource and new beginnings.Downloads
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