Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh
“Unmuting the Brutes: Human and Non-human After the Collapse of ‘Civilization’”
Thursday, February 27, 2020, 7pm
Music Recital Hall, UC Santa Cruz

The idea of the ‘human’ dates back to the founding of modernity, now hurling towards collapse. As this process intensifies it may bring about a fundamental reconsideration of modern ideas regarding which entities possess such attributes as agency, speech, and reason. If so what kinds of narratives and knowledge traditions can we turn to for guidance about what might lie ahead?

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of numerous books, including The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Hungry Tide, and The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. His most recent book, The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016.

The recipient of numerous awards—including France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor, and the Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities—Ghosh’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. Amitav Ghosh’s most recent novel, Gun Island, is due to be published in 2019.

 

The event was presented in partnership with the Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture. The Maitra lecture series, established in 2001, seeks to enrich the intellectual life of UC Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz community.

The event was co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

 

Event Photos by Crystal Birns:
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