Envisioning New Modes of Solidarity: Climate Change, Kinship, and the Uncanny in Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Experimental in form with a narrative animated by chance and the uncanny in ways that prompt incredulity, Gun Island (2019) can be read as Amitav Ghosh's endeavor to write a compelling work of fiction centered on climate change that provokes its readers into action; this is just the challenge he had posed to writers in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017). There, Ghosh argued that in order to effect a change in policy and mindsets there is an urgent need to write in fresh new rhetorical modes that strategically mobilize the logic of dreams, the uncanny, and myth, rather than cold science and reason, which have failed to convey the urgency of the climate catastrophe. Ghosh argues that we have taken refuge in paranoia rather than courage and faith that climate change can indeed be reversed, else why would we be so paralyzed by a deadly fatalism in the face of seemingly apocalyptic climate change? Utopian in impulse, Gun Island presents us with new aesthetic and epistemological modes, deploying the uncanny and the magical to provoke new insights about climate change and to re-vision new alliances between the precariat—refugees, migrant workers—and the well-meaning bourgeoisie, engendered by a powerful sense of the wonder of the natural world. In effect, Gun Island gestures to new collectivities and argues for an alternative vision of multi-species eco-justice, where human exceptionalism is not the norm.