Abstract
In this Introduction, we set the Special Issue on 'Tropical Imaginaries and Climate Crisis' within the context of a call for relational climate discourses as they arise from particular locations in the tropics. Although climate change is global, it is not experienced everywhere the same and has pronounced effects in the tropics. This is also the region that experienced the ravages – to humans and environments – of colonialism. It is the region of the planet’s greatest biodiversity; and will experience the largest extinction losses. We advocate that climate science requires climate imagination – and specifically a tropical imagination – to bring science systems into relation with the human, cultural, social and natural. In short, this Special Issue contributes to calls to humanise climate change. Yet this is not to place the human at the centre of climate stories, rather we embrace more-than-human worlds and the expansion of relational ways of knowing and being. This paper outlines notions of tropicality and rhizomatics that are pertinent to relational discourses, and introduces the twelve papers – articles, essays and speculative fiction pieces – that give voice to tropical imaginaries and climate change in the tropics.
Highlights
In this Introduction we situate the Special Issue on ‘Tropical Imaginaries and Climate Crisis’ within the context of a call for relational climate discourses as they arise from particular locations in the tropics
Ocean warming further impacts the atmospheric systems of the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which causes El Niño and La Niña events
We offer a rumination on ‘Tropical Imaginaries’ from an ecocritical-postcolonial perspective with examples drawn from literature and climate in India; followed by a deep reflection on ‘Climate Crisis’ from a science, technology and environment perspective illustrated through examples from animation and climate in Brazil
Summary
The Tropics is rendered as a geographic space of beauty, where it is warm and humid, with modest variations in temperature throughout the year, and host to the most exotic flora and fauna. The environmental concerns of the people living in the tropics, who are economically, politically, culturally, and even, geographically marginalized due to capitalist colonial invasions, are quite different from those of the developed world (see Hartnett, 2021, this issue). The actual environmental problems reside in depletion of resources which in turn lead to climate change and go hand in hand with denial of justice to local populations. India is one such country that has suffered from both colonial onslaught and neo-imperial capital hegemony. Nayar (2017) contends that literary texts are the only means of delivering the urgent news of climate change, eco-disaster and the fragility of human–nature relations
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