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A Conversation with Amitav Ghosh J. Daniel Elam

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A Conversation with Amitav Ghosh J. Daniel Elam b2 Interview 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 “The Temporal Order of Modernity Has Changed”: 11 A Conversation with Amitav Ghosh 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 J. Daniel Elam 19 20 Introduction 21 22 Amitav Ghosh is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, 23 including The Shadow Lines (1988), In an Antique Land (1992), The Glass 24 Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004), the Ibis trilogy (Sea of Poppies 25 [2008], River of Smoke [2011], and Flood of Fire [2015]); he has also written 26 essays in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New Republic. The 27 list of awards he has received is equally long and includes the Arthur C. 28 Clarke Award and the Sahitya Akademi Award; he has been short-listed 29 for the Man Booker Prize and the Man Asian Literary Prize. In 2007, the 30 Indian government awarded him the Padma Shri, one of the highest civilian 31 honors. 32 Ghosh’s latest book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change 33 and the Unthinkable (2016) is based on his Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin 34 Family Lectures, which he delivered at the University of Chicago in 2015. 35 Multiple critics have called the book “dazzling,” and I humbly add my name 36 to this list. The Great Derangement is a reflection on the work of literature in 37 38 boundary 2 45:2 (2018) DOI 10.1215/01903659- 4381136 © 2018 by Duke University Press 39 Tseng Proof • 2017.12.27 11:13 1236 boundary 2 • 45:2 • Sheet 246 of 261 Tseng Proof • 2017.12.27 11:13 1236 boundary 2 • 45:2 • Sheet 247 of 261 244 boundary 2 / May 2018 1 the age of global climate change. The age of “the great derangement”—the 2 name that future scholars will give our literary period, according to Ghosh— 3 marks the stubborn unwillingness of contemporary literature and politics to 4 come to terms with the clear, present, and global danger of environmen- 5 tal disaster. “The brilliance of The Great Derangement lies in its persua- 6 sive revelation of how our modes of representation have derailed humanity, 7 blinding us to our real condition,” notes Julia Adeney Thomas (2016: 938). 8 The Great Derangement mixes family history, literary criticism, his- 9 torical analysis, and political imperative in a way that few scholars and 10 authors have achieved. It is both a polemic and a reflection—both of which 11 are necessary—as well as a self- reflexive call to political action. It is also 12 a reminder of the collaboration that must occur between literary critics, 13 authors, historians, and activists—now, more than ever, in the age of the 14 Anthropocene. “The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the 15 imagination,” Ghosh writes at the beginning of the book (Ghosh 2016: 9). 16 The Anthropocene, as Thomas reminds us, does not simply mean 17 that humans have altered the environment—we, like most animals, have 18 always done that—but that humans have now caused “an irreversible rup- 19 ture of the Earth system itself” (2016: 932). Ghosh’s use of the term Anthro- 20 pocene in The Great Derangement, Thomas writes, “demands not local 21 adjustments to our structures of power, representation, and production but 22 their radical rethinking, with Asia at the core” (932). 23 The Great Derangement asks us to reconsider the very foundations 24 upon which the promises that modernity and globalization offered were 25 alternatively secured and denied. Global histories of capitalism and empire 26 can no longer be untethered from the species history of humans—and, as 27 Ghosh argues, are not always as clear- cut as they sometimes appear. 28 This conversation should be considered in dialogue with two recent 29 discussions with Amitav Ghosh: a forum in the American Historical Review 30 (December 2016), on the Ibis trilogy; and a roundtable in Journal of Asian 31 Studies (December 2016), organized by Julia Adeney Thomas, on The 32 Great Derangement.1 33 34 • • • • 35 36 1. Thomas et al. 2016 includes essays by Julia Adeney Thomas, Prasannan Parthasara- 37 thi, Rob Linrothe, Fa- Ti Fan, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Amitav Ghosh. AHA 2016 includes 38 essays by Clare Anderson, Gaurav Desai, Mark R. Frost, Pedro Machado, and Amitav 39 Ghosh. Tseng Proof • 2017.12.27 11:13 1236 boundary 2 • 45:2 • Sheet 248 of 261 Tseng Proof • 2017.12.27 11:13 1236 boundary 2 • 45:2 • Sheet 249 of 261 Elam / Conversation with Amitav Ghosh 245 JDE: First of all, congratulations on The Great Derangement. It’s fantastic. 1 2 AG: Thank you. 3 4 JDE: As you note, The Great Derangement is indebted to a type of think- 5 ing promoted most prominently by Dipesh Chakrabarty, when he argued 6 in “The Climate of History” that historians need to produce a new way of 7 writing history in the age of global climate change (Chakrabarty 2009). It 8 is easy to say that this essay was incredibly influential to historians and 9 literary critics everywhere—especially those of us working on postcolo- 10 nial theory and literature from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. With 11 some important exceptions, most of us hadn’t been doing this work at all. 12 But it seems equally easy to argue that that all your work has been about 13 the Anthropocene—The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004), and 14 certainly the Ibis trilogy to name a few—and not incidentally so. Why do you 15 think the Anthropocene has taken a subtle role in your work? 16 AG: Once I started writing The Great Derangement, and I was develop- 17 ing the ideas in those lectures, I suddenly realized that I had been think- 18 ing about these things for a long time—and not simply the Anthropocene. 19 Many years ago, I wrote a short piece in the New Republic called “Petrofic- 20 tion” as a review of Abdelraman Munif’s Cities of Salt quintet (Ghosh 1992). 21 Unbeknownst to me, that piece went on to become a foundational text for 22 a whole new field of study—“petroculture.” I learned of this on a visit to the 23 University of Oregon at Eugene; I had no idea. These things had been on 24 my mind, and I imagine, just as I described in The Great Derangement, a 25 lot of it has to do with accidents of my birth. I am Bengali, and I was told the 26 story about my family’s eviction from our ancestral village, by a flood, at a 27 very early age. The relationship between humans and the environment has 28 always been in my mind in some way. 29 30 JDE: What’s so interesting about your biography—growing up in Bengal, 31 your experience of the freak tornado in Delhi in 1978, your family history 32 of displacement after a devastating flood—is precisely that the human 33 experience of the environment has always been foregrounded in your life. 34 You have experienced environmental catastrophes firsthand. It is no sur- 35 prise that the environment has been an underlying issue in most of your 36 work. On the other hand, until fairly recently, the people who read literary 37 work—especially North Americans—could safely imagine that something 38 like “petrofiction” takes place somewhere else—somewhat far away, or in 39 Tseng Proof • 2017.12.27 11:13 1236 boundary 2 • 45:2 • Sheet 248 of 261 Tseng Proof • 2017.12.27 11:13 1236 boundary 2 • 45:2 • Sheet 249 of 261 246 boundary 2 / May 2018 1 the Gulf States (as in Munif’s novels). But it seems increasingly the case 2 that “petroculture”—if not “petrofiction”—is happening in North Americans’ 3 backyards. 4 AG: What you’re saying is absolutely true. Ours is a particularly extraor- 5 dinary moment in time. Suddenly the world has a completely new aspect. 6 Just the other day, I was reading about the floods in North Carolina fol- 7 lowing Hurricane Matthew [September 2016]. I have a close friend who 8 teaches at Duke, Prasenjit Duara, and he is from Assam. Assam is also a 9 very flood- prone state. I was writing him a note saying “I hope you’re OK 10 and that you haven’t been affected by these floods,” and then suddenly it 11 struck me that this is the kind of letter that we used to get in India from our 12 friends in the West. It was always the case that we were the ones being hit 13 by floods, or droughts, or some other terrible disaster. Now it’s a universal 14 condition. Everywhere in the world that you look now, the safest places— 15 Devonshire, England, for example—are being hit by epic floods [July 2012]. 16 As I say in The Great Derangement, the temporal order of modernity has 17 changed. People who were at the so- called margins of the world are now 18 actually experiencing the changes in many ways before the people at the 19 center. And not simply new weather patterns or natural disasters. In the 20 1980s, when I lived in Delhi, political terrorism and violence were a constant 21 feature of life. When bombs went off, our friends in the West would write to 22 us and say “I hope you’re OK.” That experience is now the common condi- 23 tion of people everywhere.
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