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The Great Derangement

Amitav Ghosh

Climate / colonial modernity

It deepens a route on climate and colonial modernity by tying ecological failure to cultural and historical form.

Synopsis

An argument that modern culture, literature, and politics are strangely unable to imagine and confront climate change, a failure rooted in colonial modernity.

Core passage idea

Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted work

Our literary and political imaginations were formed to hide the wild improbabilities and collective scale that climate catastrophe forces upon us.

It locates the climate crisis partly in a crisis of imagination shaped by modern, Western assumptions.

To avoid a bubble

Pair with Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature.

Reading note

Read it as essayistic cultural criticism that moves between fiction, history, and politics.

Best paired with

Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature

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