Author
The Great Derangement
In this book-length work of cultural criticism, Amitav Ghosh asks why societies that possess extensive knowledge about climate change remain so poor at imagining its consequences. He examines the problem through three connected fields: stories, history, and politics. Modern literary fiction, he argues, often treats improbable disasters and nonhuman forces as unsuitable for serious realism, even as a destabilized climate makes such events increasingly consequential. Historical accounts can likewise obscure the entanglement of fossil fuels, empire, industrialization, and unequal development. In politics, an emphasis on individual virtue and national interest struggles to address a planetary crisis requiring collective action. Ghosh therefore presents climate change not only as an environmental or technical problem but as a failure of cultural imagination. The book challenges writers, historians, and political communities to recover ways of thinking that can accommodate surprise, nonhuma…