[ad_1]
Amitav, the author of award-winning novels as well as nonfiction histories on climate change, is this years’ Distinguished Visiting Humanist. (Ivo van der Bent photo)
This year’s Distinguished Visiting Humanist says humanists have a vital role in reframing the climate crisis as rooted in history and culture as much as technology and economics.
Public Lecture by Distinguished Visiting Humanists
Thursday, April 7th at 5:05 p.m.
Hawkins-Carlson Room in Rush Rhees Library
The public is welcome to attend the free and open event
Amitav Ghosh discusses his latest book. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. In it, he traces the dynamics of today’s planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. At the center of his narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg, with its history of conquest and exploitation—of human life and the natural environment.
Essayist, novelist, and climate change activist Amitav Ghosh will be on campus in April as the University of Rochester’s 2021–22 Distinguished Visiting Humanist.
“Amitav Ghosh’s work is truly genre-defying,” says John Osburg, associate professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology. “It employs the tools of fiction, anthropology, history, and philosophy to address the most pressing global concern of our times: the climate crisis of the Anthropocene.”
Ghosh was born in Kolkata and grew up in India Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including the award-winning novels The Circle of Reason, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Hungry Tide, Sea of Poppies, Gun Island, as well as the nonfiction books The Great Derangement – Climate Change and the Unthinkable The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis.
His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and his essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times. In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade.
The Humanities Center’s annual Distinguished Visiting Humanist program—returning after a two-year hiatus due to COVID-19—brings eminent scholars and public intellectuals to Rochester’s River Campus to engage with students, faculty, staff, and community members.
Q&A with Amitav Ghosh
There’s striking attention to historical and ethnographic detail in your fiction. How has your training as an Anthropologist influenced your work in the field of novel writing? What is your opinion on the relationship between literary fiction, historical nonfiction, and ethnographic writing.
GHOSH:I consider myself lucky to have been exposed at different times in my life to different types of writing. My work as a journalist, which began with my first job and continued for many years, would be my best. The New YorkerMy career as a writer was influenced more by history and anthropology than it was by writing. The attention to detail comes, I think, from a reporter’s habit of taking notes, as much as from my training in anthropology and history. But, at the end it is clear that I am a novelist. Fiction is something I find appealing for many reasons. One reason is that fiction was my favorite form of storytelling since childhood. I love telling stories. Another reason is that fiction gives you a more complete experience than any other type of writing. It allows you to imagine the inner lives and thoughts of your characters. You can create worlds.
The term “Term” has been around for a decade. Climate fiction, or “cli fi,” has come to describe literature that tackles issues of climate change, even though such literature predates the term itself. While genre writing on climate change has emerged, you’ve argued that mainstream literary fiction has yet to engage with the climate crisis in a significant way. Can you tell us about your own turn to environmentalism generally—and to the climate crisis specifically—in your writing?
GHOSH: This term is not something I like, mainly because it reduces the severity of the planet’s crisis. As Margaret Atwood famously said, “It’s not just climate change, it’s everything change.” So to limit our concerns to climate change is to defeat the purpose. I don’t think we need a different genre to address the reality of what is happening in the world today. Climate change is not something that is happening right now, despite the existence of such a category.
Your 2016 work The Great Derangement – Climate Change and the Unthinkable, you examine—across the domains of stories, history, and politics—our collective inability to understand the implications of climate change and to act accordingly. You end with a note of hope and cautious optimism. The world has had to deal with many challenges over the years. global decline in democracy, the COVID-19 pandemic, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which some have called a “War on fossil fuels.” What is your current outlook on humankind’s ability to address the climate crisis through collective understanding and action?
GHOSH: I have always believed that it was impossible to understand the global crisis without considering geopolitics. It’s been clear for a long time that there is a huge gap between the pieties that are regularly mouthed at COP [Conferences of the Parties]Summits and the steps that are actually being made by the nations around the globe. Take a look at these: COP 21 2015Affluent countries promised to contribute $100 billion to a fund that would help poor countries cope with climate impacts. In the years since, not even a tenth have been realized. During the same time, these countries increased their defense spending to $1.5 trillion. In my last book, The Nutmeg’s Curse, I wrote: “To look these facts in the face is to recognize that it is a grave error to imagine that the world is not preparing for the disrupted world of the future. It’s just that it’s not preparing by taking mitigatory measures or by reducing emissions: instead, it is preparing for war.” The truth of this is being borne out every day.
You’re coming to the University of Rochester as the Distinguished Visiting Humanist. What role should education in the humanities, the humanistic social sciences and the humanities play in addressing climate change?
GHOSH: I think it’s a tragedy that the humanities have allowed themselves to be marginalized in the discourse on the planetary crisis, which has come to be largely framed by science, technology, and economics. But the root of the crisis is in history, culture, global geopolitics, and culture. It is vital for the humanities and other disciplines to reframe this discussion.
What are you reading?
GHOSH: Laline Paul, a young British writer, just sent me a truly wonderful novel. It’s called Pod, and it’s about a pod of whales. She succeeds splendidly in rising to what I believe to be the most important literary challenge of our time—restoring voice and agency to other-than-human beings.
Category: Society & Culture
