This study of selected literary and cinematic works by Michael Ondaatje investigates the political potential of the Canadian author’s aesthetics. Contributing to current debates about affect and representation, ideology critique and the artwork, trauma and testimony, this book uses the concept of the haptic to demonstrate how Ondaatje’s multisensory, fluid and historically inflected writing can forge an enabling relationship between audience, author and text. This is where Ondaatje’s micropolitics, often misconstrued as ideologically suspect aestheticism, emerges: a praxis that intimates how one can write and read politically with a difference.

This study of selected literary and cinematic works by Michael Ondaatje investigates the political potential of the Canadian author’s aesthetics. Contributing to current debates about affect and representation, ideology critique and the artwork, trauma and testimony, this book uses the concept of the haptic to demonstrate how Ondaatje’s multisensory, fluid and historically inflected writing can forge an enabling relationship between audience, author and text. This is where Ondaatje’s micropolitics, often misconstrued as ideologically suspect aestheticism, emerges: a praxis that intimates how one can write and read politically with a difference.