Ep. #40 – Amitav Ghosh
At (11:43) into the show we are very pleased to welcome to the podcast acclaimed Indian-American essayist and genre novelist, Amitav Ghosh. We talk about his latest work of non-fiction, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable and why he thinks it has proven so difficult to bring climate change into literature. And why he is wrong about that claim.
We discuss the worldview of the novel and how its emphasis on creating believable narratives has excluded precisely the kinds of unlikely anthropocenic encounters that are becoming increasingly frequent across the world.
Amitav argues that before an alternate world can become a reality, it needs to become an imaginative reality and this is why the arts are so crucial to coming to terms with the Anthropocene.
We also discuss “serious” art’s fear of being deemed merely “illustrative” and how this may be linked to a Cold War aversion to the aesthetics of socialist realism.
Now, Amitav warns, the world has risen up as a protagonist even as our means of representation aren’t up to engaging it. He predicts that theVIP elite mansions of serious VIP fiction will suffer a similar fate to the mansions of Miami beach as our waters rise.
We talk about what is really being denied in climate change denial and how the privileges and comforts of a carbon-fueled lifestyle is something which neither the West nor Asia is prepared to give up.
We close with Amitav’s own next novel project and how climate change inspires him personally and artistically.
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