Eco-Imaginaries: Reading Climate through Literature and Culture
J. JOHN SEKAR *
The American College, Madurai – 625 002, India.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
In the present-day context, climate culture is understood as the narratives (stories), ethics (doctrines), and emotions (affections) that shape how societies comprehend the ecological crisis in the age of the Anthropocene, and this is what literature and the humanities reconstruct. Framing climate change as a cultural and knowledge problem, this study employs an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective informed by ecocriticism, energy humanities, ecofeminism, and postcolonial ecology to read select texts written by Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Octavia Butler, Barbara Kingsolver, and Kim Stanley Robinson. This interpretive study demonstrates that the novels dismantle the mutually constitutive relationships among power, inequality and environmental discourse at the global level. Simultaneously, they define the colonial and patriarchal relations of extractivist economies. The results indicate that literature constitutes an important ethical and imaginative terrain where new models of care for the ecology, just gender relations, and intraspecies reciprocity can be formulated. Integrating the natural and social sciences with humanistic enquiry, the analysis reveals that reimagining climate culture through narrative not only encourages critical consciousness but opens up possibilities for moral and imaginative transformation and fosters planetary awareness and collective responsibility in a warming world.
Keywords: Climate humanities, interdisciplinary studies, climate justice, energy humanities, ecofeminism, postcolonial ecology