Transhistorical Connectivities Around the indian Ocean: Western Colonialism and Climate Change in Amtav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse

• Main Author: Alexandru, Maria-Sabina Draga
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: chaos; climate change; colonialism; connectivities; Indian Ocean; postcolonial ecocriticism
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss41/16; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/2058/viewcontent/KK_2041_2C_202023_2016_20Forum_20Kritika_20on_20Rhizomatic_20Communities_20Myths_20of_20Belonging_20in_20the_20Indian_20Ocean_20World_20__20Alexandru.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

This article argues that Amitav Ghosh’s non-fiction book The Nutmeg’s Curse illustrates the ways in which the proto-global entanglement of chaotic colonial forces, which proliferates across space and time, has played an important part in the current climate change. Ghosh imagines the Indian Ocean as a melting pot of rhizomatic energies of imperial aggression and local resistance, but also of new emerging life, with the agency of nature playing a very important part in the latter. I aim to show this in a combined Deleuzian, postcolonial, and ecocritical reading, with elements of chaos theory meant to provide possible interpretations to climate change phenomena in Ghosh’s narrative projection.