Climate Crisis and Historical Narrative: A Study based on Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement: the Climate Change and the Unthinkable

This paper on “Climate Crisis and Historical Narrative: A Study based on Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement: the Climate Change and the Unthinkable ” (2016) attempts to grasp Ghosh's treatment of the complexity and urgency of the subject of climate crisis from the perspective of history and power. The first part of the paper attempts to provide the context for Ghosh's deliberations on why historical frameworks are ineffectual in depicting a history of climate crisis. The second part of the paper moves with Ghosh as he develops his arguments through key topics as capitalism and historical narrative, capitalism and empire, Asia's centrality to the climate crisis, dissemination of thought and technology, and their impact on climate crisis, history of fossil fuels, on the hegemonic presence of European powers, on the canon of distributive justice, on indigenous resistance and so on. This could be the first serious reading of the part of Ghosh's text which concerns history of global warming, featuring the strengths of the arguments through textual evidences and analysis.