Indra Sinha's Animal's People examines the aftermath of a Bhopal-like event in the fictional city of Khaufpur. Often read as an allegory for postcolonial toxic entanglement, Animal's People responds to 9/11, both explicitly as a media event and implicitly through a critical engagement with Islamophobic tropes. These moments appear to confirm the tendency of Michael Rothberg's "centrifugal literature of extraterritoriality," whereby the impact of 9/11 is absorbed in the wider ambit of World Literature. In this essay, I argue that, while this may indeed be understood to be dominant in Sinha's narrative, there is an alternative, subversive reading of the novel that highlights other, less hierarchical means of comparison. By reading the novel's reflections on breath in relation to breath appearance in 9/11 criticism and poetry, I suggest a route into the postcolonial 9/11 novel that avoids centering either the USA or the postcolonial.

英德拉·辛哈（Indra Sinha）的《动物的人》考察了虚构的城市考夫布尔（Khaufpur）发生的类似博帕尔事件的后果。通常被认为是殖民后毒性纠缠的寓言，动物之民对9/11的响应，既明确地作为媒体事件，又通过与伊斯兰憎恶性言语的批判性接触而隐含地响应。这些时刻似乎证实了迈克尔·罗斯伯格的“域外离心性文学”的趋势，其中9/11的影响被世界文学的更广泛领域所吸收。在本文中，我认为，尽管这确实可以理解为Sinha叙事的主要内容，但该小说还有另一种颠覆性的解读，突出了其他比较少层次的比较方法。通过阅读小说在9/11批评和诗歌中关于呼吸与呼吸出现的关系的思考，我建议进入后殖民9/11小说的一条路线，避免以美国或后殖民为中心。