Planetary Consciousness: Multispecies Justice and Myth in Gun Island
Keywords:
Cli-fi, planetary consciousness, Sundarbans, Anthropocene, ecocriticismAbstract
Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island fuses Bengali folklore, the Gun Merchant myth, and Sundarbans ecology to reframe the Anthropocene climate crisis. This paper shows how the novel blends cli-fi with planetary consciousness, linking Little Ice Age history to modern upheavals like rising seas, cyclones, species displacement, and human migration. By dissolving myth-science binaries and critiquing anthropocentrism, Ghosh exposes ecological injustice and multispecies vulnerability, advocating relational stewardship and transnational solidarity. Situated in ecocritical discourse, the paper reveals the novel’s ethical call for humility, collective action, and reenchanted human-nature bonds amid global precarity.
References
Afroz, Sahrear. “Witnessing Climate Crisis in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 13, no. 2, 2021.
Ghosh, Amitav. Gun Island. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.
Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford UP, 2008.
Jindagi Kumari. “Myth and Climate Crisis: A Case of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island.” Pinter Society, 2022.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.
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