The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

In his introduction, editor Adrian Cooper expresses hope that the variety of voices offered in Arboreal will heal people’s estrangement from their traditional woodlands , but the collection was equally compelling and valuable to me, a reader with no firsthand experience with such a landscape. From the introduction onward, I was compelled to read further in Arboreal while conducting side research into the history of people, forests, and woodcraft. Raised at the edge of the Cross Timbers ecoregion of Oklahoma, I lack the ecological frame of reference the contributors share. Although my background lacks the deep husbandry of woods that yields terms such as coppice or pollard, Arboreal captured my imagination. Greg Brown Mercyhurst College Amitav Ghosh. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Gurgaon, India. Penguin Books India. 2016. 284 pages. What ensues when a prolific writer often known for his literary fiction points to an aporia that has been prominent in literary studies for a while but hasn’t yet managed to gain attention? Emphasizing the erasure of the nonhuman in mainstream literary fiction where the former is relegated fit for science fiction, Amitav Ghosh’s recent work, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, highlights the limits of human vision, both creative as well as political , in eliciting a response to global climate change. Such a claim, first of all, unsettles the modern reader into recognizing his/her collusion in generating this crisis and also in its maintenance. However, before we drown ourselves in the burden of responsibility—a moral dilemma that is a panicked response to the crisis but fails to leave an impact— Ghosh’s narrative leads toward a collective imaginary. Commenting on how the “moral-political can produce paralysis” as the climate crisis gets reduced to individual preferences and any search for collective measures gets abandoned, he interrogates the “politics of sincerity.” Instead, Ghosh situates climate crisis in the onslaught of global capitalism and, especially in the case of developing countries, in the expanding European empire, manifesting the paradoxical state of modernity today. Often in the public sphere, global climate change is made the developing world’s problem; more so because of statistical figures that reveal the alarming rise in levels of pollution in countries like India. However, this public sentiment is only selectively true as it fails to take into account world politics on climate issues. Without sounding apologetic on behalf of the developing nations, Ghosh is able to locate the central tenet of today’s climate crisis: the reliance on human-centric approaches in understanding a terrain that has proved beyond man’s control. If this book invites us to reconfigure our idea of “political,” which continues to overlook the environment, it equally challenges us to rethink the role that global politics, with its competing power relations, would play in the turmoil and its aftermath. Ghosh’s narrative is a step toward raising consciousness in the public sphere. It will reach its impact if nation-states take cognizance how global warming might be decisive in reshaping world politics—a thought that is still “improbable” in our collective imagination. Kanak Yadav Jawaharlal Nehru University Astrid Lindgren. A World Gone Mad: The Diaries of Astrid Lindgren, 1939–1945. Trans. Sarah Death. London. Pushkin Press. 235 pages. “A terrible despondency weighs on everything and everyone. The radio churns out news reports all day long. . . . God help our poor planet in the grip of this madness!” Substitute “radio” for “Internet” and this could be from many a contemporary diary. It is, however, taken from the first entry in Astrid Lindgren’s “war diaries,” written between 1939 and 1945, before and during her rise to popularity as creator of the Pippi Longstocking series, among many others. From day one of the war, Lindgren followed the newspapers and radio closely, meticulously summarizing what she read and heard. She tracks the rising tide of fascism in Germany and Italy, the ebb and flow of their allies, and the fall of their enemies . While Lindgren was staunchly antifascist , through her words we see Sweden’s World Literature in Review 90 WLT MARCH–APRIL 2017 ...