Ethnographic Surrealism in Gun Island
Reorienting Climate Change Narrative
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11677331 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lava Asaad (0000-0001-9150-9854, Auburn University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 7-17 |
| Publication date | 2022-12-23 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | South Asian Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0275-9527 • E-ISSN: 2573-9476 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02759527.2022.2159688 |
| OpenAlex | W4312100628 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island brings to the forefront the inadequacy of realist fiction in presenting climate crisis. Assiduously, the novel teems with alternative modes of narration that dispenses with the authority of accurate representations of crisis. In this essay, I am applying James Clifford’s term “ethnographic Surrealism” in analyzing Ghosh’s representation of catastrophe in Gun Island. The inception of Surrealism in 1920s and 1930s in Europe was a recourse for its proponents to find new ways to process the aftermath of WWI. Similarly, I argue that Ghosh is dismissing strict realist fiction in writing about catastrophe. The novel has been lauded for its improbable realities, implausible connections, and folkloric Bengali legends. Ghosh is juxtaposing otherwise clashing cultural discourses to creatively characterize climate change. In this way, Ghosh is requestioning the prevalent mode of responding, mainly categorized by concealing or denying, to climate crisis through offering non-western and unscientific solutions that work on blurring the boundaries of “real” and “surreal” in countering climate catastrophes. Ghosh, as Clifford would argue, is emphasizing that cultural norms and production of knowledge about crisis is part of “artificial arrangements.” I argue that in writing about catastrophe, Ghosh does not start from the presupposition that reality is absolute; instead, Ghosh finds a utopia in reconstructing reality.Keywords: Ethnographic Surrealismclimate changeAmitav Ghoshcli-fimythology Notes1 See the work of Brandon Jones (Citation2018), Pablo Mukherjee (Citation2006), Jana María Giles (Citation2014) for more on climate change and Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.2 See the work of Matthew Benjamin Cole (Citation2022) on the nature of climate novel.3 See the work of Sarah S. Amsler (Citation2010) and Kathryn Yusoff and Jennifer Gabrys (2011) for more on the role of imagination in rethinking climate crisis.Additional informationNotes on contributorsLava AsaadLava Asaad is a Lecturer at Auburn University. Her research areas include but are not limited to Anglophone literatures, Modern British literature, Women and Gender Studies and Middle Eastern literature. She received her doctoral degree from Middle Tennessee State University (2019). She is the author of Literature with a White Helmet: The Textual-Corporeality of Being, Becoming and Representing Refugees (Routledge, 2020). She is the coeditor of In the Crossfire of History: Women’s War Resistance Discourse in the Global South (Rutgers University Press, 2022)
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Ethnography · Folklore · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Presupposition · Representation (politics · Sociology · Utopia · Anthropology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Law · Modern American Literature Studies · Philosophy · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics
The Novel, Volume 1
The global deluge
Discourse on Colonialism
The Great Derangement
Can the Sublime Be Postcolonial? Aesthetics, Politics, and Environment in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
Postcolonial Science Fiction
The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism
At the heart of human politics
The Surrealist Look
On Ethnographic Surrealism
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |