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This article, using the riots in The Shadow Lines (1988) as a point of departure, maps a more general system of representations of multitudes within Amitav Ghosh's work. Its implications, in turn, can shed light on Ghosh's relationship with the idea of collectivity, which is more fraught with tensions and ambivalence than it may initially appear. More precisely, I argue that Ghosh's work is deeply concerned with the various ways in which collectivities, masses and gatherings of different kinds can affect, enhance, diminish or threaten individual existences, and tries to find a reconciliation between the collectivity and the individual. As a result of these anxieties, Ghosh tends to represent crowds and multitudes chiefly in two modes: as an anonymous, dehumanized and threatening mass; or as a community of individuals bound together by spontaneous human solidarity. In turn, this tends to exclude from his imaginative horizon certain kinds of collectivities that do not fit in either of the two modes, such as various kinds of explicitly politically engaged movements. Besides The Shadow Lines – the moment in which Ghosh lays the foundations of this system of representations –, the article considers other works of fiction and non-fiction – most notably "The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi" (1995), In an Antique Land (1992), The Hungry Tide (2004) and River of Smoke (2011) – in order to show how the characteristics of this system have remained consistent throughout Ghosh's career. The point of arrival, finally, is Ghosh's recent work on climate change and migration – The Great Derangement (2016) and Gun Island (2019) – in which the shortcomings of this system of representations, as regards Ghosh's intervention in current public debates, come to light with particular clarity.

The six years Robert Louis Stevenson spent in the Pacific region offer a particularly stark contrast with his received image as an uncommitted romancer (and hence, in the context of British colonialism, as a tacit supporter of imperialism). His Pacific writings are the work of a powerfully realist writer, with strong interests in ethnography and local history, engaged in the political life of the region, and an active supporter of the native populations in their opposition to imperial rule. In this article I focus on "The Bottle Imp", a short story that, at first sight, constitutes a less confrontational, more accommodating literary project if compared with most of Stevenson's production on the Pacific. However, not only does this text encapsulate several elements of the poetics that characterize Stevenson's Pacific writing, but it is also the only work of Stevenson's career to be conceived for a Polynesian audience, which adds a significant layer of complexity to its analysis. I argue that with this work Stevenson creates a "born-translated" fairy tale, which results in the adoption of specific narrative techniques and in a particular declination of Stevenson's political agenda and anti-exoticist strategies. This, in turn, means to frame "The Bottle Imp" within some of the current debates on the global circulation of literature and its effect on the politics, ethics and aesthetics of literary texts.

As the anglophone Indian novel exists in the in-between space between transnational and local cultures, it has repeatedly staged the encounter between a variety of cultural dimensions while remaining acutely aware of the way they interact with historical and political discourse. This essay examines four novels—Raja Rao's Kanthapura, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Anita Desai's In Custody and Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide—that have conceived their narratives as a site of encounter between cultures in response to articulations of Indian national identity. The essay stresses the authors' shared concerns but also the different formal solutions and ideological positions they adopt. Rao—a pre-Partition author—deals with otherness within a nationalist paradigm. Rushdie, Desai and Ghosh, on the other hand, tackle otherness in different modes that are dependent on their writing after Partition and in a climate of growing violence and fundamentalism