Novel Contributions to Ecocritical Thought: Re-cognizing Objects through the Works of Amitav Ghosh

In his polemic The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh considers our collective inability to engage with climate change in a meaningful way. He argues that the climate crisis is at its core a crisis of the imagination, presenting our failure to recognize human impacts on the environment as rooted in our difficulty imagining the sheer scale and urgent nature of the problem (Ghosh, The Great Derangement 7). He attributes this imaginative failure in part to the fact that contemporary fiction seems incapable of convincingly representing the effects of climate change. Despite their perceived improbability, climate change impacts, such as rising sea levels and increasingly frequent extreme weather events, are overwhelmingly affecting communities that depend on the environment for their survival. Other-than-human actants are making their presence known in our daily lives with increasing force.1 Ghosh acknowledges this reality and echoes Donna Haraway’s call to begin thinking more seriously about our “barely possible but absolutely necessary joint futures” (Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto 7). He believes fiction has a crucial role to play in the climate crisis, and many contemporary scholars agree: “The power of story is particularly significant. Our sense of reality, our understandings of who we are and of our relationships with our surroundings, generally are constructed around stories, not around quantitative data” (Thornber 5; see also Buell vi; Morton 9; DeLoughrey et al. 9–10). In The Great Derangement, Ghosh considers how narrative might provide the means to better face present ecological conditions and identifies recognition as an important part of this process. He takes recognition to signal two separate, though interconnected, phenomena: the experience of being struck by a realization through an act of observation and the cognitive shift that may occur as a result. In this regard, recognizing can lead to re-cognizing. We ask whether narrative fiction might help us to make this transition and re-cognize the lively relationships between humans and nonhumans, biotic and abiotic entities.2

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