The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Ghosh, A. (2016). Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Ghosh focuses on the absence of climate change in literature outside of its treatment as uncanny, unprobable, and often supernatural in science fiction. Our collective failure to imagine and acknowledge climate change and to subsequently take action, positioning the Anthropocene and an agential nature as the ‘unthinkable’ instead, is what Ghosh means by the ‘Great Derangement.’ Rather than revealing our present reality, the art and literature of our time conceals it. Ghosh’s work is divided into three sections: stories, history, and politics, and throughout he connects our culture to our desire for consumption and our larger carbon-based economy: culture is intertwined with the imperialist and capitalist processes which make up our world order. The first section on stories explores why literature is not addressing climate change, centring the human and everyday instead of the ‘unthinkable.’ The second section on history connects our environmental crisis to the history of empire and its processes of slavery, capitalism, and imperialism. It suggests we need a new conception of society, the environment, and nature to tackle climate change. It also interrogates the discourse of modernity, its sustainability, and its ability to be practised around the globe by focusing on Asia as a locus for climate change because of its delayed industrialisation. Finally, the last section on politics connects capitalism to the distribution of power and the hegemony of the West. It suggests that political discourses of individualism cannot tackle our environmental crisis that demands collective action. Ghosh’s cultural exploration is unique in that it looks to all kinds of texts: literary, historical, scientific, and religious throughout and even compares the 2015 Paris agreement with Pope Francis’s encyclical letter of the same year.

Example quotation

‘In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what should they – what can they – do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight? Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.’

p. 11