CRITICAL CLIMATE STUDIES BOOK SERIES Routledge India

Humanities

In his work of non-fiction The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh examines the inability of the present generation to grasp the scale of climate change in the spheres of Literature, History and Politics. The central premise in this work of non-fiction is based on the statement that literature will one day be accused of its complicity with the great derangement and of blind acceptance of the climate crisis. This paper will study how Ghosh's fictional and non-fictional enterprise voices a call for more imaginative and cultural forms of fiction that articulate resistance against materialism that can destroy our planet. We shall see how Ghosh's fictional enterprise falls within the sphere of postcolonial eco-criticism that considers the phenomenon of "material eco-criticism". I shall also reveal Ghosh's environmental advocacy in his works of fiction, The Ibis Trilogy and The Hungry Tide. This paper will analyze how the Ibis Trilogy is not just an exploration of the particularly heinous operation of imperial power leading up to the Opium Wars but is also an eco-critical narrative that articulates resistance against the violence of climate change. A study of The Hungry Tide will also reveal how this hybrid literary text is both a historical account of the Marichjhapi massacre and a plea to preserve the ecosystem of our time. I shall thus consider the challenges that climate change poses for the postcolonial writer and the evolving grid of literary forms that shape the narrative imagination.

eTropic, 2021

Global climate change threatens to kill or displace hundreds of thousands of people and will irrevocably change the lifestyles of practically everyone on the planet. However, the effect of imperialism and colonialism on climate change is a topic that has not received adequate scrutiny. Empire has been a significant factor in the rise of fossil fuels. The complicated connections between conservation and empire often make it difficult to reconcile the two disparate fields of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies. This paper will discuss how empire and imperialism have contributed to, and continue to shape, the ever-looming threat of global climate crisis, especially as it manifests in the tropics. Global climate change reinforces disparate economic, social, and racial conditions that were started, fostered, and thrived throughout the long history of colonization, inscribing climate change as a new, slow form of imperialism that is retracing the pathways that colonialism and globalism have already formed. Ultimately, it may only be by considering climate change through a postcolonial lens and utilizing indigenous resistance that the damage of this new form of climate imperialism can be undone.

Comparative Literature: East & West, 2011

Carbon pollution and over-use of Earth's natural resources have become so critical that, on current trends, we will need a second planet to meet our needs by 2030, the WWF said on Wednesday. (Agence-France Presse) [IJ The blunt report above arrives more as a routine piece of data than some calculation that affronts or might give us pause. As the ticker-tape of climate mutation manifests itself as past and present evanescent phenomena-mass droughts in China, flooding in Australia, food crises, super twisters, earthquakes linked to geo-engineering, arctic melt-off and so on, all traversing the present as in some film-whatever is left of the populace is watching in disconnect mode. The essays of this volume comprise a dossier on the following question: how do the legacies of critical practices honed from 20th century agendas mutate, alter, or adapt 13

2022

Tackling how racial justice and climate crisis are entangled, this essay introduces a speculative cartography experiment entitled The World We Became: Map Quest 2350. A collaboration between a collective of artists, poets, academics, curators, architects, and activists, this digital humanities project maps global ecological crises and shared Black, Asian, Pacific, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Caribbean, and Indigenous futures. Intentionally produced in a multimedia format, the born-digital speculative design experiment features visual and audio components presenting a planetary vision of the year 2350 as an underwater future in ruins. The atlas connects five transnational imaginaries that rescript the geographic boundaries of what we currently understand to be South Asia, the South Pacific, the Middle East, North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Situating nation-state borders as recent constructs, in this creative exercise the natural environment becomes a model for imagining interspecies relationality and co-presence. Mangroves and atolls form portals to speculative futures of non-human existence beyond the climate crisis and the impact of racial extractive capitalism. Anchored in five locales, the collective text brings together a global vision of survivance addressing migration, dispossession, Asian diaspora, Native sovereignty, Black fugitivity, and broader questions of global indigeneity. With life emerging from the ruins, this atlas forms a digital blueprint of suboceanic futures and the practice of interrogating what justice could mean in the far future.

LITINFINITE JOURNAL, 2021

Literary Oracle – ISSN: 2348-4772 – Vol.6, Issue 1, 2022

Nature has become a constant source of stimulation for the authors for generations. Numerous literary creations have been associated with the faultless natural ambience of the universe. But unlike environmentalists, the writers of literary texts have little or no scope to raise a protest against the degradation of the environment. Very few writers have been preoccupied with the thought of environment in their texts and that is the main cause of the existence of an insufficient number of literary texts having environmental issues. In the late 1980s in the United States and later on in the 1990s in the United Kingdom, an emergent movement has started to study the intrinsic relationship between literary texts and the environment. This study is defined as ‘eco-criticism’ or ‘green studies’. Ecocriticism analyzes the role that the natural environment plays in the imagination of a cultural community at a specific moment. In this paper, I would like to focus on the ambiance of the debate that propagated the acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh to write a new non-fictional work The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable in 2016. This is a marvelous volume from Ghosh that evenly assesses and demonstrates the confines of human consideration when it comes to the apprehension of environmental disasters. This is a grave issue that reflects our ‘deranged’ manners of socio-economic as well as political matters through several themes like history, politics, and literature. Amitav Ghosh tries to answer the relevant questions: why is serious fiction reluctant to deal with climate change and environmental issues? If it does, then why is it immediately classified as science-fiction or relegated to subgenre literature? Answering some of the assumptions implied in Ghosh’s discourse, it is possible to situate his text and the relevance of climate change within our literary and philosophical discourse and to re-think our cultural and environmental policies and instructive engagement.

5-6 April 2019 Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 University. Montpellier, France Keynote speakers: Thomas Dutoit, Lille U, France Bénédicte Meillon, Perpignan VD University, France In collaboration with: Sylvère Petit (film producer, photographer), France This conference will attempt to trace and analyze modes of reading and writing that are not based on human mastery and exceptionalism, but rather make room for different possible viewpoints, while also questioning our identity as well as the objectivity and limits of human perception. The conference is built around the necessity to adopt a different way of reading and writing that shakes the foundations of our thinking about Earth and its various inhabitants, and forces us to see anew a landscape whose very form has been defamiliarised by the forces that traverse it. Such reading and writing might have to come to terms with what Timothy Morton calls “the symbiotic real” – the interconnectedness between species. Today, going beyond ourselves requires learning to reread ourselves and our current environment to understand our vulnerability while assuming responsibility for the endangered planet and non-human species. From encounters with diverse forms of non-human otherness (the planet, animals, forests, ...) and one’s otherness within, would emerge an ethics of alterity. We welcome papers for 20-minute presentations in English on writing and reading (not limited to literature or to humanities only) the Earth/the world/ worlds.

Working Papers in World-Ecology, 2022

The World-Ecology Research Group is a collaboration of scholars at Binghamton University. We are committed to the liberation of knowledge from bourgeois hegemony. The world-ecology conversation pursues syntheses of power, profit and life in world history-including the history of the present crisis. This implies, and necessitates, a reimagination of revolutionary possibilities in the era of climate crisis. In these syntheses, questions of domination, exploitation, and accumulation are situated in and through their mutually constitutive relations with and within webs of life. We publish research-in-progress that speaks to capitalism's antagonistic relations of power, profit and life, historically and in the present crisis. We welcome contributions that engage a broadly defined world-ecology conversation, including generative disagreements. These include concept notes, theoretical reflections, and empirically-grounded assessments of capitalist development and crisis, past and present.