Postcolonial Narratives and the "Crisis of Imagination" in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Climate change poses a problem that fiction has struggled to address. Amitav Ghosh names this failure the "Great Derangement," a civilizational blindness built into the modern novel itself. This paper examines how postcolonial narrative, and Ghosh's own fiction in particular, responds to what he calls a crisis of imagination in the Anthropocene. The essay begins with Ghosh's diagnosis in The Great Derangement: the realist novel's commitment to probability and the ordinary pushes catastrophic weather into genres it treats as lesser, such as science fiction. The novel's inherited focus on individual consciousness, developed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cannot easily encompass a crisis that is collective, planetary, and slow. Modern rationalism resists a world where nonhuman forces act with an apparent intention, and this resistance is cultural at root, not merely scientific. The paper then reads The Hungry Tide, Ghosh's novel of the Sundarbans, as an attempt to write climate crisis differently. Its shifting tidal islands, its cyclone, and its account of the Morichjhapi refugee settlement show ecological catastrophe and political displacement as inseparable. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism, particularly the work of Graham Huggan, Helen Tiffin, Rob Nixon, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, the paper argues that climate change cannot be understood through meteorology alone. It is a problem of colonial history, uneven carbon responsibility, and power. The conclusion asks what kinds of art might address a submerged future, one where the Sundarbans, Bangladesh, and other low-lying regions of the Global South face the earliest and harshest consequences of a crisis they did least to cause. Postcolonial narrative does not solve the crisis of imagination. It offers a place to begin.