Re-Storying a Planet in Crisis: Amitav Ghosh's Politics of Vitality

What is the political work of storytelling in an era of planetary crisis? This essay thinks along with Amitav Ghosh, whose recent work examines the intertwining dynamics of climate change, colonialism, and cultural imagination. It is stimulated by his call, in The Nutmeg's Curse, for a ‘politics of vitality’ based on the alignment of human communities with nonhuman species and ecosystems, and by his claim that storytelling must be at the core of this politics. After reconstructing Ghosh's genealogy of a colonial ‘war against vitalism’ that rendered nature and the communities closest to it ‘mute’ and ‘brute’, I read his account of vitalist politics alongside his novel Gun Island and his short story ‘The Living Mountain’, each of which intimates the power of stories to repopulate a present hollowed out by colonial modernity with the suppressed voices, agencies, and kinships whose reconstitution is a condition of freedom and flourishing. I then stage a dialogue between Ghosh and recent work in political theory in order to press vitalist politics into a democratic register Ghosh himself elides, such that stories do not merely reorient their audiences' perceptions but assemble collectives capable of answering the more-than-human world.