Oceans of Memory: Blue Humanities and Ecological Consciousness in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction

This paper examines Amitav Ghosh’s major works through the growing field of Blue Humanities, a field that focuses on the roles and importance of the sea and rivers in a cultural, ecological, and historical context. While drawing from major and most popular works such as The Hungry Tide and the Ibis series Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire, and also his non-fiction The Great Derangement, presented particularly through a theoretical and Blue Humanities understanding, it will also attempt to contribute to and see how postcolonial ecocritical ideas and Blue Humanities can inform us that Ghosh’s most popular works present a discussion and a way toward a planetary ethics and how his most popular fiction transgress and transcend anthropocentric modernity and how his most popular fiction demands an urgent re-examination and re-framing of our relationship with the sea and coastal ecosystems at a period of climate crisis and urgency.