`Author:` [[Amitav Ghosh]] `Availability:` [[Available Books]] ## Summary **The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable** (2016) by **Amitav Ghosh** is a work of cultural criticism exploring why modern society—especially literature, politics, and history—has failed to confront the reality of climate change. Ghosh argues that future generations will view our era as one of **“great derangement”**—a time when people recognised the threat of climate catastrophe yet largely ignored it. He divides the book into three sections: **Stories**, **History**, and **Politics**. 1. **Stories** Ghosh examines how contemporary fiction, particularly the modern realist novel, is ill-equipped to represent the improbable and large-scale events of climate change. Literature privileges the ordinary and individual, whereas climate change is collective and planetary. Thus, the climate crisis becomes “unthinkable” in the realm of art and imagination. 2. **History** He challenges the idea that the Anthropocene began in recent centuries, tracing its roots to **European imperialism** and the **colonial extraction of resources**. Industrial capitalism and empire, he argues, are inseparable from the environmental devastation now confronting the globe. 3. **Politics** Ghosh criticises the **failure of political systems**, particularly liberal democracies, to respond effectively to climate change. He links this paralysis to global inequality and the lingering legacy of colonialism, where the Global North continues to externalise environmental costs onto the Global South. Climate change is not only an environmental crisis but a **crisis of culture and imagination**—our political institutions, historical narratives, and artistic forms have failed to make sense of it or inspire adequate action. --- ## Key Takeaways To confront climate change meaningfully, Ghosh insists, humanity must **rethink its cultural narratives**, **recognise the colonial roots of the crisis**, and develop new ways of storytelling that restore the sense of the **collective, the nonhuman, and the planetary.** ## Quotes - ## Notes > [!info] > ![[The Great Derangement.jpg]] `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:` [[Books index]]