Abstract
Focusing on Amitav Ghosh's novel The Hungry Tide, this article explores the challenges faced by cosmopolitans seeking to make an ethical intervention in a subaltern space. By dramatizing the encounter between bourgeois characters and the traumatic history of people inhabiting the Sundarbans region of Bengal, Ghosh suggests that an unreconstructed cosmopolitanism is incapable of addressing social injustices; to effect any positive change, the cosmopolitan must undergo a transformation. This paper locates affect as the agent of that critical transformation, a surplus that is transmitted beyond the horizon of personal witnessing and into the larger community of writers and readers.