An Unconstructable Indian Ocean: Amitav Ghosh’s Ecological Imaginary in Sea of Poppies and The Great Derangement

Abstract

In his 2019 book The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation, Frédéric Neyrat opposes the idea that, having come very close to destroying the Earth in the Anthropocene, man can now use geoengineering to reconstruct it. Instead, Neyrat proposes an “ecology of separation” which recognizes the Earth’s self-regenerating capacity as essentially separate from man’s intrusion, thus suggesting that the condition for the world to survive in an age of increasing apocalyptic dangers is an acceptance of the limitations of human agency. This article will argue that Amitav Ghosh’s own ecological project, developed in his 2016 essaybook The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, which started as early as his historical opium war novel Sea of Poppies (2008), narrates an ecology of separation similar to Neyrat’s, a version of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s “green postcolonialism” that confronts Eurocentric aggression against non-European civilizations and against nature.