Abstract

This paper examines Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement as a critical intervention in global climate discourse, arguing that the climate crisis represents not only an environmental or political challenge but a deep cultural and imaginative failure. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, the study analyzes how Ghosh critiques the narrative limits of Western realist traditions that privilege individual agency, linear progress, and the “probable,” while marginalizing collective experience, nonhuman forces, and planetary scale. The paper situates Ghosh’s argument within the historical framework of colonial capitalism, showing how extractive economies and epistemic hierarchies formed under empire continue to shape ecological injustice and global inequality in the present. The analysis further explores Ghosh’s call for a renewed ecological imagination grounded in myth, indigenous knowledge, and ethical storytelling. By blending realism with folklore and cultural memory, Ghosh repositions literature as a space of moral witnessing, capable of restoring connections between human and nonhuman worlds. The study also highlights how his work re-centers perspectives from the Global South, challenging universalist models of Western environmentalism and emphasizing climate change as an uneven and historically conditioned experience. Overall, the paper argues that The Great Derangement reframes literature as a vital ethical and political practice in the Anthropocene. Rather than treating storytelling as a reflection of reality, Ghosh presents it as a formative force that can shape ecological awareness, historical responsibility, and collective imagination. In doing so, the study contributes to ongoing debates on the role of narrative in confronting planetary crisis and in envisioning more just and interconnected ecological futures.