Bodies of Knowledge: Discredited Sciences and Technologies of Resistance in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu

This article analyzes how Larissa Lai’s novel The Tiger Flu (2018) critically engages with (neo-) colonial oppression and a science discourse instrumentalized to aid in this process. In her dystopian world, the reign of Western science, blinded by the conviction of its own exceptionalism and superiority and fraught with neoliberal capitalist interests, has come to an end. In order to survive in a world rendered inhospitable by pollution, climate change, resource scarcity, and overwhelming inequality, adaptability becomes key. New solutions, the novel suggests, can be found in alternative, indigenous knowledge traditions that, by creatively adapting Western science and technology to their own more holistic approaches, can make life sustainable again. Lai unsettles the pervasive trope of techno-Orientalism in her novel and employs it to suggest creative postcolonial processes of syncretism, of different knowledge traditions and transgressive ways to rethink (human) identity as the way towards a more equal and egalitarian future.