NARRATING THE ANTHROPOCENE: CLIMATE ANXIETY AND ECOLOGICAL ETHICS IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND POSTCOLONIAL FICTION

Abstract

The Anthropocene notion has impacted the humanities by the expectation of the entwining of human history and geological time. In literary studies, contemporary British and postcolonial fiction has become a critical site of the study of climate anxiety, environmental precarity and ecological ethics. In this paper, we will examine the story of the Anthropocene in the chosen contemporary novels through the perspective of postcolonial ecocriticism basing primarily on theoretical models of Rob Nixon and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Theory of climate change as a crisis of historical consciousness, created by Chakrabarty, and the slow violence, as explained by Nixon, can provide a complementary perspective of how to approach the problem of environmental catastrophe in literature. Through a keen study of the works of Solar by Ian McEwen, and The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh. This journal article argues that contemporary fiction does not represent climate anxiety as a fear of an individual, but rather as a historically structured affect that is founded on colonial extraction, unequal development and world inequality. The stories are a critique of the anthropocentric ethics and propose relational, planetary explanations of responsibility. The present study demonstrates that literary form bargains local histories of dispossession and global ecological crisis, altering the ethics imaginaries of the Anthropocene, and situates the literary form at the center of the discussions of slow violence, deep time, and postcolonial modernity.