Queering the Capitalocene: Sympoiesis, Assemblage, and Radical Kinship in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

Abstract: This article reads Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide as a narrative of queer ecological resistance to the Capitalocene. It argues that the novel stages radical kinship as a world-making practice through which human and more-than-human actors form sympoietic assemblages—forged in scenes of necropolitical violence, mythic ritual, and collaborative tracking—that refuse asset logic. Synthesizing Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory with queer ecologies, the analysis shows how these partnerships enact a “becoming-with” that deterritorializes extractive control, embraces a queer temporality, and models an immanent politics of multispecies justice. Ghosh thus offers a speculative ontology where kinship functions as an ethical alternative to the disposability of nature-as-asset. Keywords: Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, Capitalocene, Assemblage, Sympoiesis, Queer Ecology.