Demystifying the Local?: Cosmopolitan Justice and the Reconstruction of the Other in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

Yi-Shin Jo Yueh
PhD Candidate, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University

Abstract
  By dealing with violations of human rights in Sri Lanka during its civil wars, Ondaatje’s 2000 novel shows hesitation to accept the humanitarian intervention authorized by the UN Security Council to overrule state sovereignty. The novel recounts the homeward journey of a diaspora, Anil, who is a member of human rights organizations and anthropologist coming back to investigate mass political murders. Nevertheless, the author plays with the novel’s title by using the possessive adjective “Anil’s” to propose an ethical relationship of belonging between the cosmopolitan and the local, but not that of possession or control. It means that Ondaatje’s novel does not so much deal with individuality as with collective and culturally-affirming community. This paper argues that Anil’s Ghost moves away from the normative and political accounts of cosmopolitanism into the domain of a transnational cosmopolitan community. Through the process of reconstructing the war victim’s identity, Anil participates in and witnesses how local communities in different ways “read” the information of the skeleton—and comes to identify with her native land. In the first half, this paper will begin by reviewing how the novel thematizes the concern with massive violations of human rights and outside intervention justified on humanitarian grounds. By assigning the heroine the role of both the UN representative and the cosmopolitan outsider, Ondaatje’s novel not only questions the international authority as an external intervener but reveals its limitations when it comes to state sovereignty. By undoing the coupling between the UN and professional groups, the novel, as the paper’s second half shows, allows the cosmopolitan elitist Anil to join and embrace local cultures and communities. Through the process of reconstructing Sailor’s identity, Anil cannot but ask help from local experts and forge a community based on a shared ethics of professional obligation—which is both transnational and culturally specific.

Keywords: cosmopolitanism, professionalism, human rights, witnessing