Decostruzione di uno scienziato coloniale. Il Cromosoma Calcutta di Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh’s postcolonial science fiction _The Calcutta Chromosome_ is a rewriting of Ronald Ross’s memoir. The novelist deconstructed the self-aggrandizing autobiography of the English scientist proposing an alternative explanation for his findings on malaria. Thus the novel foregrounds the role of the subalterns who have played in Ross’s entourage and indirectly points out the invisible connection between the colonial project and western epistemology. Nor is the role of the colonial scientist relegated to the Nineteenth century: by juxtaposing the xix and the xxi century, Ghosh’s novel shows how the public persona of the scientist has retreated into a more liquid ‘system’, whose front-man is no longer a human being, but a modern supercomputer.