Human Trafficking, the Opium Wars and the Climate Crisis: Amitav Ghosh’s Historical Fiction.

Friday, November 12, 2021 The event started -867 days ago

3:30 PM 4:30 PM

Morton Hall

295

RELCAS Presentation

Human Trafficking, the Opium Wars and the Climate Crisis: Amitav Ghosh’s Historical Fiction. 

Dr. David St. John, Lecturer

Department of English

ABOUT:

In this interdisciplinary RELACS symposium, I combine sociological research conducted on-site at the Po Leung Kuk museum/school in 2019, a Hong Kong based institution devoted to rehabilitating current survivors of human trafficking in East Asia and documenting its history, with an environmental reading of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, the novels Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. I apply pressure to the socio-political apparatuses of British imperialism and consider the agency of the more-than-human realm during the time period of the Opium Wars. This theoretical stretching allows for literature to emerge as a place where “natural” and “human” histories intertwine, allowing critics to see the correlative and causal relationships between environmental catastrophe and anthropocentric violence. Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy locates the human trafficking of slaves and sepoys during the Anglo-Chinese war as a critical ancestor of contemporary globalization.  These novels and his non-fiction treatise The Great Derangement underscore the importance of seeing global climate change as not only a result of homo sapien activity at large, but as a conglomeration of regional racist interruptions, local sites of uneven development, and the illicit traffic of living matter. This presentation argues that Ghosh’s historical fiction serves as a vital entry point for discussions about how the legacy of slavery and the continued violence of human trafficking is inextricable from discussions about environmental degradation and the Anthropocene.

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Details

Category
Conference/Lecture
department
College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, English
Audience
Students, Faculty and Staff, Alumni

Contact

CAHS Office of the Dean This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Venue

Morton Hall

1310 Ben Graves DriveHuntsville, AL 35899

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