Locating Empire and Capitalism in Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times

Amit Kumar^1*  & Vikas Sharma^2 
1PhD Scholar, Department of English, Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut, India & Assistant Professor of English, Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi, Delhi, India. *Corresponding author.
²Department of English, Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut, India

^{Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 16, Issue 1, 2024. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v16n1.11
[Article History: Received: 24 November 2023. Revised: 02 February 2024. Accepted: 12 February 2024. Published: 24 February 2024]}

^{Full-Text PDF Issue Access}

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh entitles the opening section of his nonfiction on climate change The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017) as “Stories.” Here, Ghosh highlights the significance of stories and storytelling practices in re-imagining our age of global warming and climate change. He displays how stories function as stimuli for the resurgence of our imaginative power to re-cognize the “unthinkable”, the non-human world and the intricate relations between humans, nonhumans and the natural environment. Drawing upon the insightful studies of the ecological aesthetics of stories and storytelling in the age of Anthropocene, the paper discusses how environmental storytelling as part of indigenous orality is reinvented by Ghosh in his latest fiction The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times (2022) which tends to look at the Anthropocene through the prism of empire and capitalism.

Keywords: Storytelling, Anthropocene, empire, ecocentric, ecological imperialism, capitalism.

Sustainable Development Goals: Climate Action, Life on Land

Citation: Kumar, A. & Sharma, V. (2024). Locating Empire and Capitalism in Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times. Rupkatha Journal 16:1. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v16n1.11