"None of that shit matters to the Swedes": Venice, Bangladesh, and the Postcolonial Anthropocene

This chapter examines recent literary and visual texts that represent the Bangladeshi migrant community in Venice as a vantage point to observe the postcolonial condition in the context of the planetary environmental crisis. The texts analyze different forms, genres, and languages: Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island (2019), Francesco Dalla Puppa, Francesco Matteuzzi, and Francesco Sare- sin’s graphic novel La linea dell’orizzonte (2021), and Emanuele Confortin’s docu- mentary Banglavenice (2022) expose the Anthropocene unconscious of a city that has traditionally been used to represent romantic and escapist fantasies or apoca- lyptic scenarios. While popular culture still produces countless narratives and dis- courses that envision a timeless Venice or its mirror image as a moribund, drowning city, the texts under scrutiny show a more complex, living, cosmopoli- tan, and amphibian Venice where new and old communities interact and rein- vent themselves in relation to a fragile ecosystem threatened by sea-level rise. Their stories, which also connect the city with global histories and geographies, show how the long-term effects of colonialism and of the Anthropocene are inter- twined, narrate how migrants negotiate new lives and identities, and offer per- spectives of postcolonial translators, artists, and intellectuals who connect us to multiple stories for our times of crisis.