Cognitive (In)justice and Decoloniality in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) is an insightful deliberation on the layered inequities and asymmetries created by the intersection of colonialism and anthropogenic activities. In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh conceives the present-day climate and ecological crisis as fallouts of colonial thinking and its manifestations in dominant epistemic and ethical constructions. This article underscores Ghosh’s critique of the Eurocentric discourses for their instrumentality in producing the totalitarian binaries of human and non-human, in which the ‘human’ was always the whites and the ‘non-human’ comprised all ‘others’—the non-whites, indigenous people, nature and ecology. In attributing agency and signifying authority to the white capitalist, this dualistic thinking has always conceived of the ‘others’ as non-humans—those who could be objectified, commodified and tampered with. This article explores how Ghosh repudiates this colonialist monolithic demarcation, which, in compliance with the discourse of the Anthropocene, had annihilated non-Western forms of signification, knowledge and ethics. The article focuses on how the systemic othering of Western modernity’s episteme had been incremental, leading to occurrences of ‘testimonial injustices’ and ‘hermeneutical injustices’—which had culminated in severe forms of epistemicide and unleashed, what Boaventura de Sousa Santos terms ‘cognitive injustice’—relegating indigeneity and ecology to precarious conditions. In accordance with this, this article argues that Ghosh envisages a critical necessity to dismantle the matrix of Western capitalist modernity and its associated narrative of the Anthropocene and claims for a conceptualization of decolonial ecological ethics that would prioritize an encompassing of the episteme produced by the ‘other’. An engagement with the indigenous voices and a restoration of non-Western modes of knowledge production are crucial, as they can offer new ethical dimensions to envision ecology and life with its multiplicities and facilitate ‘cognitive justice’ for the oppressed and unrepresented ‘other’.