Geographies of affect: Loneliness, debility, and witnessing in Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025)

This article, situated within the broader affective turn in postcolonial literary studies, argues that Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny maps a geopolitics of affect. By decentring purely rationalist frameworks, this theoretical turn reveals how systemic power operates somatically, treating loneliness as a profoundly political condition rather than a universal psychological state. Moving beyond traditional paradigms of diasporic alienation, it examines how patriarchal, neocolonial, and global-capitalist structures produce historically specific “affective disorders”. Through a biopolitical lens, the analysis contrasts three such disorders: the loneliness of patriarchal stasis (debility), neocolonial mobility (minor feelings), and neoliberal performance (disidentification). It further explores the novel’s meta-commentary on postcolonial representation to propose a model of affective witnessing. Desai’s work is thus read as a vital theorization of loneliness as a geopolitical condition, exposing the visceral affective costs of living within the enduring legacies of empire and the contemporary contradictions of late capitalist globalization.