2019/01/08 by Caitlin Vandertop · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Hydropower, Displacement, Environmental Impact #Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East #South Asian Studies and Diaspora
paper · doi:10.1080/17449855.2018.1562491
openalex publication_date 2019/01/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
This article situates Amitav Ghosh’s thesis of anthropocenic modernity as a “great derangement” within the context of the British colonial city and its environmental vulnerabilities. Showing how Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies [2008], River of Smoke [2011] and Flood of Fire [2015]) highlights the appropriation of natural resources by financial markets, the article reads Ghosh’s narratives of magically altered landscapes – and the strange coincidences and chance encounters that they produce – as part of a “world-ecological” literary engagement with the transformations of the British Empire’s opium regime and its carbon-intensive infrastructures. If the colonial founding of Hong Kong speaks to the scale of these transformations, the floods, rising tides and typhoons that threaten the city can be read as narrative premonitions of capital’s ecological limits, revealing the prehistories of the climate crisis from the coastal cities in which it originated.