This blog is part of a lab activity designed by Dilip Barad to enhance our understanding of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island. The activity encourages us to identify concepts that are difficult to understand and explore ways to address and clarify them through guided learning resources.
For detailed tasks and structured questions, click here to access the worksheet.
Here are videos which I have taken for References
Part I - Historification of Myth & Mythification of History | Gun Island | Amitav Ghosh
Part III - Historification of Myth and Mythification of History | Gun Island | Amitav Ghosh
.png)
.png)
Table: Sources on Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island
Most Frequently Cited or Referenced Sources in the Notebook
Based on the contents of the notebook, citation patterns reveal a clear hierarchy of influence. Amitav Ghosh’s own fictional and theoretical writings dominate as the primary reference points, followed by a small group of scholarly studies that function as shared conceptual anchors across multiple analyses.
1. Core Foundational Works: Amitav Ghosh
The single most consistently cited figure across all sources is Amitav Ghosh himself, particularly through a combination of his fiction and non-fiction.
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) is referenced by nearly every scholar in the notebook. It is used to frame the idea of a “crisis of imagination” in modern literature and to justify critical approaches that move beyond realist narrative conventions.
Gun Island (2019) serves as the central primary text, cited universally for its engagement with myth, climate disruption, migration, and nonhuman agency.
The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) is also frequently cited, especially in discussions that connect environmental catastrophe to colonial violence, extractive economies, and global inequality.
Together, these works establish the theoretical and narrative foundation upon which all secondary analyses build.
2. Most Frequently Cited Secondary Analytical Works
Among the academic sources included in the notebook, a few stand out for their repeated cross-referencing by other scholars:
These works function as shared theoretical reference points, shaping how other scholars frame their readings of Gun Island.
3. Observed Citation Patterns and Scholarly Relationships
The notebook’s sources form a dialogic scholarly network, where authors repeatedly draw on one another’s conceptual frameworks to extend their own arguments:
Rakibul Hasan Khan (2024) emerges as a particularly influential figure. His articulation of “planetary environmentalism” is frequently adopted by Iftakhar Ahmed and Sabine Lauret-Taft to explain how Gun Island transcends national, ecological, and epistemological boundaries.
Edwin Gilson (2022) is consistently cited in discussions of the Los Angeles wildfires, which are interpreted as symbolic entry points into a globally interconnected environmental crisis.
Bose and Satapathy (2021) serve as the primary authority on the socio-political mechanisms of climate-driven migration, especially in relation to refugee exploitation and the role of “connection houses.”
The Cartography of Global Precarity operates as a meta-text within the notebook. Its comprehensive scope leads it to reference nearly every other major analysis, positioning it as a synthesis that maps the pervasive interconnectedness central to Ghosh’s narrative universe.
3.Summarize the primary perspective of the top five most substantial sources
Primary Perspectives of the Five Most Substantial Sources
The following overview outlines the central critical positions of the five most significant analytical works in the source set. Each approaches Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island through a distinct but interrelated theoretical framework, collectively illuminating the novel’s engagement with climate crisis, migration, and myth.
1. Rakibul Hasan Khan: Planetary Environmentalism
Rakibul Hasan Khan advances the concept of “planetary environmentalism,” arguing that the scale of the climate emergency renders human-drawn borders increasingly irrelevant. He contends that Gun Island envisions a world in which survival depends upon multispecies, multi-ethnic, and transnational collaboration. Central to his reading is the idea of multispecies justice, where the displacement of animals and ecosystems is inseparable from the forced migration of vulnerable human populations in the Global South. Khan further situates these crises within the historical legacies of European imperialism and the ongoing operations of global capitalism, which he identifies as primary accelerants of planetary instability.
2. Claudia Sadowski-Smith: Migration and the Blue Humanities
Claudia Sadowski-Smith employs the frameworks of blue humanities and critical oceanic studies to analyze Mediterranean migration against a backdrop of colonial maritime history. She reads the novel as drawing parallels between seventeenth-century oceanic trade routes—including the transoceanic slave trade—and contemporary systems of human trafficking. Her perspective emphasizes how Gun Island critiques the militarization of European sea borders while advocating for a longue durée understanding of migration as a phenomenon shaped by environmental degradation, economic exploitation, and multispecies movement across watery spaces.
3. Ashwarya Samkaria: Postcolonial Nonhuman Agency
Ashwarya Samkaria offers a postanthropocentric interpretation of the novel, foregrounding the role of nonhuman agency in destabilizing Western human-centered epistemologies. Her analysis centers on the concept of trans-corporeality, which underscores the inseparability of human bodies from ecological and material systems. In her reading, creatures such as spiders and snakes function not as symbolic backdrops but as active agents whose climate-driven migrations unsettle rigid notions of sovereignty and national borders, revealing the porousness of political and ecological boundaries alike.
4. Dr. Kankana Bhowmick: Precarity and the Neoliberal Anthropocene
Dr. Kankana Bhowmick approaches Gun Island through the lens of precarity, focusing on how neoliberal economic structures institutionalize vulnerability. She argues that the novel portrays climate refugees as members of a global precariat, suspended in legal and political limbo and rendered expendable by state power. Drawing on the notion of homo sacer, Bhowmick suggests that anthropogenic climate change is not accidental but rather a direct outcome of extractive capitalism, which has transformed human life itself into a condition of permanent exposure to risk.
5. The Cartography of Global Precarity: Interconnectedness and Myth
This comprehensive meta-analysis presents Gun Island as a form of critical cartography, mapping the collapse of conventional spatial, political, and symbolic boundaries. It identifies the Sundarbans–Venice axis as a site of ecological and historical convergence, noting how both locations confront existential threats—one through rising sea levels and the other through biological invasion. A central contribution of this report is its focus on digital connectivity, particularly the smartphone, which it characterizes as a “migrant’s magic carpet” that enables navigation through opaque global systems while simultaneously reinforcing new forms of surveillance and disempowerment.
4. Identify 'Research Gap' for further research in this area
Identified Research Gaps for Future Study
A close synthesis of the existing scholarship reveals several unresolved areas that invite further investigation at the intersection of climate change, migration, and literary studies, particularly in relation to Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island.
1. Socioeconomic Dimensions within Migration Theory
One significant research gap concerns the limited integration of contemporary socioeconomic drivers of migration into literary analyses of the novel. As Claudia Sadowski-Smith observes, Gun Island privileges allegorical parallels and historical continuities—such as comparisons between modern trafficking networks and the transatlantic slave trade—while giving less attention to the specific economic and policy mechanisms that precipitate present-day displacement. These include neoliberal reforms, structural inequality, and region-specific conflicts in areas such as the Global South and the Middle East. Future research could productively bridge literary ecocriticism with empirical migration studies to better account for how political economy, policy, and profit intersect with environmental collapse.
2. Legal Recognition of the Ecological Refugee
The scholarship consistently highlights the absence of legal recognition for climate-displaced populations under the 1951 Refugee Convention. While Gun Island dramatizes this vulnerability through its portrayal of marginalized “new subalterns,” there remains a gap in policy-oriented literary analysis. Further research could explore how literary narratives might contribute to reframing climate migration as a legitimate form of adaptation within international law, thereby moving discussions of justice beyond symbolic representation toward actionable legal and institutional reform.
3. Regional Gaps in Climate Literature
Despite the global reach of climate disruption, several scholars point to the underrepresentation of Southeast Asian literary responses to environmental crisis. Although Ghosh’s work has been central to foregrounding climate change within Indian English fiction, there is limited research on how regional languages and indigenous narrative traditions across South and Southeast Asia are engaging with ecological catastrophe. This gap invites comparative studies that examine alternative aesthetic forms capable of representing the “environmental uncanny” without defaulting to Western realist conventions.
4. Human Agency in Digital and Impersonal Systems
Another underexplored area concerns the tension between human agency and digital infrastructure. The sources describe modern subjects as enmeshed within impersonal technological systems—such as smartphones, GPS, and social media—that simultaneously enable migrant survival and intensify surveillance, dependency, and ecological harm. Future research could investigate strategies for reclaiming agency within these systems, addressing the paradox of technology as both an instrument of resilience and a mechanism that deepens planetary precarity.
5. Re-enchantment and Ethical Praxis
Several scholars, including Zakiyah Tasnim, advocate for re-enchantment—the recovery of myth, spirituality, and the “unreal”—as a necessary response to ecological crisis. However, a notable gap remains in translating this affective and ethical awakening into sustained political and collective action. Further inquiry is needed to examine how mythic imagination and traditional ecological knowledge can be integrated with scientific governance and environmental policy, enabling societies to move from narrative awareness and moral recognition toward what might be described as “active hope.”
5. Draft a Literature Review ending with hypotheses and research questions pertaining to this research gap.
The contemporary literary landscape has seen a significant shift toward climate fiction (cli-fi) as authors grapple with the "crisis of imagination" identified by Amitav Ghosh in his theoretical work, The Great Derangement. Ghosh argues that Western realism, which focuses on individual psychological depth and domestic stability, is structurally ill-equipped to represent the "environmental uncanny" and the non-linear, planetary scale of climate change. His novel Gun Island functions as a narrative response to this formal limitation, utilizing generic hybridity—incorporating myth, folklore, and the supernatural—to map the collapse of traditional boundaries between the human and non-human world.
1. Planetary Environmentalism and the Dissolution of Borders
A core theme identified in recent scholarship is "planetary environmentalism," a concept which posits that borders lose their functional meaning when the future of the entire planet is at threat. Scholars like Rakibul Hasan Khan and Edwin Gilson observe that Ghosh uses geographical syncretism to link disparate sites—the Sundarbans, Los Angeles, and Venice—as a single "living organism" defined by environmental flux. In this framework, the "porous borders" of the Sundarbans and the Venetian lagoon reveal the shared vulnerability of multispecies lifeworlds. The migration of non-human agents, such as the northward movement of yellow-bellied snakes in California and shipworms in Venice, serves as a literal and metaphorical transgression of man-made "borders and orders".
2. Myth as an Epistemological Tool
The novel’s reliance on the myth of Manasa Devi and the legend of the Gun Merchant is seen as a deliberate attempt to reclaim "the unreal" as a valid mode of knowledge. Unlike strict realist narratives, Gun Island uses these folkloric elements to establish historical parallels between the "Little Ice Age" of the 17th century and the current Anthropocene. Ashwarya Samkaria and Mobisha Keni argue that these mythic structures function as an "ecological parable," reminding humanity of the consequences of hubris and the "war between profit and nature". By granting agency to non-human forces—treating dolphins and serpents as active agents rather than background scenery—Ghosh challenges Enlightenment binaries and advocates for "multispecies justice".
3. Precarity and the Digital Refugee
The human dimension of this crisis is explored through the lens of "precarity" in the neoliberal age. Kankana Bhowmick identifies a new "precariat class" of climate refugees who exist in a state of legal and social limbo, often reduced to "bare life" or homo sacer by sovereign powers. This precarity is exacerbated by digital connectivity; while the internet serves as the "migrant’s magic carpet" for navigating illegal routes, it simultaneously subjects individuals to "impersonal systems" that erode human agency and presence. Technology is thus portrayed as a form of "demonic possession," where systems follow their own inscrutable imperatives regardless of human mastery.
4. Identified Research Gap: The Socioeconomic-Legal Disconnect
Despite the novel's comprehensive mapping of interconnectedness, Claudia Sadowski-Smith and other critics identify a significant research gap in how literary ecocriticism engages with the specific socioeconomic drivers and legal frameworks of migration.
• The Neoliberal Omission: While the novel critiques "greed" as a historical continuity, it tends to gloss over the specific neoliberal reforms and economic disparities that function as primary drivers of conflict and movement in the 21st century.
• Legal Precarity: The sources emphasize that "ecological refugees" currently have no legal status or protection under the 1951 Refugee Convention. There is a lack of research on how literature can bridge the gap between "mythic awareness" and the formalization of migration as a mode of climate adaptation within international law.
• Agency vs. Possession: While the novel explores the "loss of will" in digital systems, further research is needed to investigate how human agency can be reclaimed within these impersonal digital infrastructures to foster collective political action.
Hypotheses and Research Questions
Hypothesis 1: The reliance on allegorical and mythic frameworks in climate fiction may inadvertently obscure the specific neoliberal policy failures that drive modern human trafficking, thereby limiting the genre's capacity to influence practical political reform.
Hypothesis 2: Formalizing the concept of the "ecological refugee" in international legal discourse requires a shift from "crisis-based" narratives to "adaptation-based" literary representations that portray migration as a proactive survival strategy rather than a passive disaster response.
Research Questions:
How can the "planetary consciousness" developed in Gun Island be translated into a concrete ethical framework that addresses the specific neoliberal reforms (e.g., in the Global South) driving contemporary migration?
In what ways can the "re-enchantment" of the world through myth be integrated with modern scientific and legal governance to move from an awareness of interconnectedness to the establishment of multispecies legal rights?
To what extent does the portrayal of digital technology as "demonic possession" in cli-fi undermine the potential of digital activism as a tool for reclaiming agency among the precariat?
How do regional literary traditions in South Asia (beyond English-language fiction) represent the socioeconomic machinery of the climate crisis differently than the globalized narrative of Gun Island?
Learning Outcomes from ResearchGate Flipped Learning Activity on Gun Island
I clearly understood the concept of Historification of Myth and Mythification of History through videos and AI visuals.
I learned how Gun Island connects myth, climate change, and migration at a planetary level.
Creating an AI-generated video helped me understand difficult theoretical ideas more easily.
NotebookLM slides saved time and improved my conceptual clarity.
I developed the ability to identify research gaps and key scholarly arguments.
I understood migration as both human and nonhuman movement caused by the climate crisis.
AI tools proved useful for learning complex literary concepts.
References :
Ghosh, Amitav. Gun Island: A Novel. 2019.
.jfif)
No comments:
Post a Comment