Shwetha Chandrashekhar, PhD candidate, recently published an article, "Beyond Disability and Disaster: The Affect of Debilitation in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People," in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.
The abstract reads:
"This article demonstrates how Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007) conceptualizes debilitation as an affective post- disaster condition. The novel does this by foregrounding Animal’s unpleasant feelings, involuntary bodily responses, and unruly sexual urges. Building on Jasbir K. Puar’s conception of debilitation, I argue that Sinha not only obfuscates the ability- disability binary but also highlights the porosity between concepts such as the human, animal, and subhuman by depicting debilitation as a consequence of invisibilized forms of violence and injustice that are stretched across vast swathes of time and space. In illustrating the complex affective dynamics between Animal and other characters, the novel portrays disidentification as a response of marginalized and minoritarian subjects to the debilitation engendered by neoliberal capitalism, thereby offering readers a new way of grasping the intersections between disability, masculinity, and sexuality. Further, I suggest that Sinha captures the persistence of debilitation in Khaufpur, the fictional city in which the novel is set, through the ever-present and recurrent possibility of apocalypse. Against that persistence, Animal’s People balances the possibility of subaltern solidarity. The novel thereby calls for a more nuanced understanding of debilitation in the twenty-first-century Global South."