Migration and Environmental Justice: Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy

The figure of the public intellectual continues to dominate in chapter 4 which reads Amitav Ghosh’s and Arundhati Roy’s nonfictional works dealing with climate change and paths to environmental justice. In The Great Derangement (2016)and Power Politics (2002) respectively, Ghosh and Roy hold responsible for the planetary crisis what they variously call ‘discontinuous’, ‘partitioned’ thinking. This is the kind of thinking that cannot see relationalities between distinct epistemologies and instead, motored by a capitalist- colonialist paradigm, enforces binaries between man and nature, human and nonhuman, self and other, east and west, and so on. For Ghosh, a decolonial approach that emphasizes connections rather than oppositions is part of the answer, and similarly for Roy, it is the modern, colonial worldview based on divisive cognitive practices that must be dismantled. Both Ghosh and Roy also concur that the discourse of environmental damage has for too long been cloaked in the jargon of experts, and so, they call for a return to ‘ordinary language’ and themselves write in the spirit of public intellectuals.