View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Institutional Research Information System University of Turin Il Tolomeo [online] ISSN 2499-5975 Vol. 19 – Dicembre | December | Décembre 2017 [print] ISSN 1594-1930 Amitav Ghosh: Climate Change Here and Now Carmen Concilio (Università degli Studi di Torino, Italia) Abstract In this contribution I would like to give back something of the atmosphere of the debate that gave birth to Amitav Ghosh’s essay The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). By referring to the lectures that preceded its publication and to the introductory presenta- tions of the author on behalf of major scholars of the University of Chicago, and to the questions by the audience, it is possible to reconstruct a whole debate that acquires different meanings in the Anglophone countries and in Europe. Questioning some of the assumptions implied in Amitav Ghosh’s discourse it is possible to better place his text and the relevance of climate change within our literary and philosophical discourse, and to re-think our cultural policies, and didactic engage- ment, here and now. Keywords Environmental Humanities. Amitav Ghosh. Literature. Climate change. On the occasion of Earth Day, on Saturday, April 22, 2017, Amitav Ghosh’s essay The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), was released in its Italian translation by Anna Nadotti and Nor- man Gobetti: La grande cecità. Il cambiamento climatico e l’impensabile, by Neri Pozza, in Vicenza. This was an important gesture on the part of the publisher, that salvaged the celebration from the risk of empty rhetoric and allowed literature to speak to a wider audience. On that day, celebrations, meetings, and talks contributed to the spread- ing of environmental awareness; one such event was the March for Sci- ence in Washington DC, which asked for a renewed attention to a science, ‘the truth’ of a science, based on facts, evidence, serious research and its dissemination.1 As we can all easily read on the Web, the main aim of the Earth Day Network is to achieve global climate and environmental literacy by 2020, thanks to education and to a new platform providing didactic and pedagogic materials to both teachers and students. Furthermore, environ- mental justice is a major topic in this context and current debate, aimed as it is at raising consciousness and creating a new citizenry. The National Geographic Science Festival in Rome (11-14 May 2017) somehow echoed the principles of the March for Science, promoting sci- entific culture in Italy, too. 1 URL https://www.earthday.org/earthday/ (2017-07-21). DOI 10.14277/2499-5975/Tol-19-16 Submission 2017-07-13 | Acceptance 2017-09-06 © 2017 | cb Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License 259 Il Tolomeo, 19, 2017, 259-274 [online] ISSN 2499-5975 Amitav Ghosh perfectly embodies these initiatives, for his essay adds on to the classical philosophy of nature, ethical responses to political, eco- nomic and cultural derangements, the aesthetic quality of an imaginary shaped for too long by models and narrative patterns imposed by Western literature and by the modern bourgeois novel. This cultural, psychological and philosophical model has become dominant all over the world with the complicitous forces of colonialism, imperialism and neo liberalism. Thus, Ghosh starts creating a discourse that follows the steps of Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (1993), in that he, too, delves into the implica- tions that bind culture to economics, to political and juridical powers, to the philosophy of science. Before being published in India (Penguin) and in the US in 2015, Ghosh’s essay was presented in the form of four public speeches held at the Uni- versity of Chicago, within the Berlin Family Lectures program. The aim of this paper is to reproduce the atmosphere and debate of those public talks, all easily available on Youtube, for a readers’ audience. The first lecture (29 September 2015) was introduced by Dipesh Chakra- barti, author of the well-known essay Provincialising Europe (2007), his- torian and scholar of subaltern studies. About The Great Derangement, he claims that as a follow up to all of Ghosh’s writings the relationship between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ remains a central discourse. He also rightly points out a movement in Ghosh’s writings from an early phase, when his fiction was set on land, that is inland, to a later phase of fictions dealing with rivers’ estuaries and deltas, even seas and oceans. The movement is also from a focus on the human experience to a focus on the non-human: dolphins and sea-life, as happens in The Hungry Tide (2004), for instance. Therefore, he concludes, Ghosh’s further movement to climate change is not surprising. In that lecture, which is also the first part of the volume, Stories, Amitav Ghosh tries to answer the following questions: why is serious fiction loath to deal with climate change? And if it does, when does that happen? Why is it that it is immediately classified as ‘sci-fi’, or relegated to a subgenre? The answer is complex and composite, yet Ghosh has an immediate first proposal. He claims that the challenges that climate change poses […] derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that started to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth (7; emphasis added).2 2 Ghosh 2016. All references are to this edition. 260 Concilio. Amitav Ghosh: Climate Change Here and Now [online] ISSN 2499-5975 Il Tolomeo, 19, 2017, 259-274 Thus, our frame of mind, our way of reasoning, our episteme is subjected to a grid, a model, a pattern that conditions and limits our imagination. That grid works as a normative Super-ego that imposes rules, while concealing other possible shapes and patterns. Climate change has been removed from our consciousness as if it were ‘akin to’ extra-terrestrial phenomena, not of this world. We have become blind to life-changing threats, writes Ghosh. And therefore the Italian title of the volume has explicitly become La grande cecità (2016). It is Chakrabarty in his essay “The Climate of History”(2009), who specifies that in this era of the Anthropocene […] humans have become geological agents, changing the most basic physical processes of the earth. (2016, 9) The climate crisis is a crisis of culture and of the imagination. For our imagination has been moulded by, for instance, Jane Austen’s narratives of green meadows. This cultural matrix, this grid, has it origins in the car- bon economy, in capitalism and in colonialism. But our time of distraction, evasion, and concealment is a time of great derangement, says Ghosh. Now, at this stage, few considerations must be made on the coloniza- tion of the mind and culture, and on the risk of a single narrative about landscape. The crisis of the imagination that Ghosh laments reminds one of the words of the Caribbean novelist and poet Wilson Harris, who claimed that we have lost the capacity to marvel at a man walking on the moon, this is a failure of the imagination (Maes-Jelinek 1991). As regards the colonization of the imagination, it is sufficient to remind ourselves of the words by Lucy, a character in Jamaica Kinkaid’s homony- mous novel: I remembered an old poem I had been made to memorize when I was ten years old and a pupil at Queen Victoria Girls’ School. I had been made to memorize things, verse after verse, and then had recited the whole poem to an auditorium full of parents, teachers, and my fellow pupils. […] The night after I had recited the poem I dreamt, continu- ously it seemed, that I was being chased down a narrow cobbled street by bunches of those same daffodils. (Kincaid 2002, 8) When Lucy finally sees real daffodils for the first time in her life she reacts: Along the path and underneath the trees were many, many yellow flow- ers […] I waned to kill them. Just like that. I wanted to kill them. (7-9) William Wordsworth’s poem “The Daffodils” (1807) resurfaces in a recent novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake, and in the eponymous film (2006) directed and produced by New York based, Indian filmmaker Mira Nair. Concilio. Amitav Ghosh: Climate Change Here and Now 261 Il Tolomeo, 19, 2017, 259-274 [online] ISSN 2499-5975 Ashima, the female, promised-bride protagonist of the novel is inquired after her studies and she is asked to recite a few stanzas from the poem The Daffodils (Lahiri 2003, 9), while in the film she stands up and shyly pronounces those same stanzas in the presence of her parents and pro- spective in-laws (fig. 1). Figure 1. Mira Nair, The Namesake. Mirabai Films, USA 2006, starring Tabu (Ashima) 77’ These two examples, both coming from writers based in New York, one from Antigua, in the Caribbean, and one from West Bengal, in India, rep- resenting two different generations, and published after a time span of more than a decade, show that if not the green meadows and wuthering heights of English literature, at least a foreign flora was certainly invading the private lives and local culture of people and writers in the colonies. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-1894) is taken by Ghosh as an example of a vernacular Bengali writer, who eagerly adopted and mimicked the western modern and realistic style, with its “regime of thoughts” and its “gradualist uniformitarian view” on nature (Ghosh 2016, 25). Nevertheless, one feels the necessity to claim that there are, there must be, other landscapes/mindscapes.