Welcome to this unit titled Climate Migration
in Speculative Fiction, Rethinking Displacement Through Literature.
In this unit, we will explore how speculative
fiction by the authors from Global South has
engaged with the challenges of climate migration.
We will reflect on how historical and colonial
legacies continue to shape contemporary migration,
how speculative narratives can transform our
views on borders and identity, and how climate
fiction expands the discussion to include
the displacement of non-human life.
Climate change is far more than a
crisis of weather or natural disasters.
It is a crisis of human displacement.
As Naomi Klein reminds us, the reality of
an economic order built on white supremacy
is the whispered subtext of our entire response to the climate crisis.
This observation makes us recognize that the
forces driving both climate change and climate
migration are deeply rooted in long-standing
social and economic inequalities, which are
reflected in the disproportionate impacts on
marginalized communities and in the
systemic neglect of those most vulnerable.
Amitav Ghosh, in The Great Derangement, reflects
on his own heritage, noting that his ancestors
were ecological refugees long before the term was invented.
This compels us to consider migration not as
a new phenomenon, but as a recurring human
condition made ever more urgent by today's warming planet.
Moreover, Ghosh draws on the work of Christian
Parenti to forecast a future where nation-states
may be forced to operate like armed lifeboats,
keeping blood-dimmed tides of climate refugees at bay.
Yet, as scholars like Giovanni Bettini caution,
climate science does not provide any formula
for how to connect ecological conditions to migration.
Andrew Baldwin reinforces this view, reminding
us that migration is irreducible to nature
or climate, and urging us to rethink climate
change and migration not as a problem to be
solved, or as an object of state management,
but as a racial relation to be historicized.
In this unit, we will explore how climate
fiction has engaged with these challenges.
Our discussion will focus on Amitav Ghosh's
Gun Island and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, while
briefly touching upon what other voices are
in the Global South vis-à-vis climate fiction.
Through these texts, we will reflect on how
historical inequalities rooted in colonialism
and economic exploitation continue to shape both
the narratives and realities of climate-induced displacement.
Gun Island is a novel by Amitav Ghosh that
blends myth, history, and contemporary ecological
crisis to explore the complexities of migration.
It is set in the Sundarbans, a sinking mangrove
ecosystem that becomes a site of what Rob
Nixon terms slow violence, a gradual attritional
destruction that displaces both humans and animals.
The novel intertwines myth, history, and
contemporary issues of climate change and migration.
The story follows Dean Dutta, a rare book
dealer from Kolkata who becomes fascinated
by the legend of Bonduki Shadagar, or the
gun merchant, a 17th century trader
cursed by the snake goddess Manasa Devi.
As Dean traces the origins of this tale, he
embarks on a journey that takes him from the
Sundarbans, a region vulnerable to climate
change, to Venice, where he becomes
entangled in the lives of climate refugees.
Ghosh's narrative not only challenges conventional
notions of migration, but also actively reconfigures its portrayal.
In Gun Island, migration is depicted as a
dynamic multifaceted journey, encompassing
both voluntary and forced movements of humans
and animals between the global north and south, both legal and illegal.
Throughout his travel, Dean encounters characters such as P.R.
Roy, a marine biologist, and Tipu, a young
man, whose experiences highlight the harsh realities of migration.
Along the way, he realizes that the ancient
legend of Bonduki Shadagar eerily mirrors
present-day crisis, from rising sea levels to forced displacement.
The novel ultimately suggests that migration,
both human and non-human, is not just a modern
crisis but an ongoing process shaped
by environmental and historical forces.
It is remarkable in its depiction of a world
disrupted by multi-species migration, a theme
that contemporary climate fiction has been
slow to fully address, while much of modern
speculative fiction tends to focus on human
migration, Ghosh extends the narrative to
include animal migration, thereby capturing the
broader ecological impact of climate change.
Rather than reducing displacement solely to an
environmental catastrophe, Ghosh foregrounds
how colonial legacies, economic exploitation,
and cultural disruption have long shaped and
continue to shape the patterns of migration.
In doing so, the novel calls on us to re-conceptualize
migration as a complex process, deeply embedded
in our historical and socio-economic fabric,
and challenges us to reflect critically on
how these forces continue to influence present-day displacement.
In contrast to the mythic storytelling of
Gun Island, Mohsin Hamid's Exit West employs
a strikingly different narrative device, the mysterious door.
The novel opens in a city swollen by refugees, but mostly still at peace.
As violence escalates, the protagonists Nadia
and Saeed discover mysterious doors that suddenly
appear across the world, acting as portals to other countries.
Through these doors, Nadia and Saeed, and
countless other migrants, migrate to other lands.
From Mykonos to London to California, the
couple finds their way through these mysterious
portals to newer places and new lives.
Although Exit West does not engage explicitly
with climate migration, its themes
resonate with the contemporary crisis.
In a world where ecological disasters and
economic instability force millions to leave
their homes, the notion of borders dissolving,
whether naturally or through a fantastical
door, captures the urgent need to
rethink our current systems of control.
Hamid deliberately keeps the protagonist's home
country unnamed, reflecting the
universality of displacement and conflict.
As migrants move through doors into new locations,
each space is reshaped by the influx of displaced people.
Hamid shows how migration affects both those who
arrive and those who host, revealing tensions
around resources, identity, and belonging.
Hamid's portrayal is a powerful counterpoint
to the armed lifeboat scenarios described
by Parenty and echoed in current policies,
where nation-states seek to contain or control displacement.
Instead, Exit West positions migration as
a transformative process, one that brings
together diverse cultures, challenges xenophobic
narratives, and ultimately fosters new forms of human connection.
Yet the novel also calls for caution.
Andrew Baldwin warns that when we label people
as potential climate change migrants, we risk
fostering a new kind of racism, one that strips
away individual human experiences and reduces them to mere statistics.
Hamid, however, imbues his characters with
dignity and depth, reminding us that each
journey, each passage through a door
is a story of loss, hope, and renewal.
Through its blend of realism and fantasy,
Exit West encourages us to view migration
as both inevitable and transformative.
It compels us to look beyond its rigid confines
of national borders and to consider a future
where human mobility is embraced as a natural,
even necessary, aspect of our global community.
While Ghosh and Hamid anchor climate migration
in South Asia, writers across the Global South expand this narrative.
Nigerian author Nnedi Okorafor reimagines
eco-resistance in Lagoon, where marine displacement
triggers societal upheaval, centering African
futurist solidarity with non-human life.
Tentacle by Dominican writer Rita Indiana is set
in the Caribbean during a time of environmental
collapse sparked by three ecological disasters.
The anthology Eco-Oceanic Southern Flows collects
speculative works that explore water politics
and environmental injustice from formerly
colonized regions in Africa, South Asia, South America, and Australia.
Other works, such as Neo-Sun's original speculative
fiction by People of Color and Africa Risen,
bring together diverse diasporic voices that grapple
with multifaceted realities of climate-induced migration.
Meru delves in the transformative potential of
migration and South Asia's evolving environmental
landscape, while Tate Thompson's Far From
the Light of Heaven offers an African vision
of a future reshaped by ecological upheaval.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain provides a poignant
depiction of urban resilience in a city confronting
the harsh realities of a climate-altered future.
While this list is not exhaustive, together all
these works underscore that climate migration
is not merely an environmental crisis, but a
complex, deeply human phenomenon that demands
both critical reflection and innovative storytelling.
From Ghosh's Sundarbans to Hamid's Magical
Doors, these narratives reject the idea of
climate migration as a distant crisis.
Global South authors ground displacement in
the urgent present, where rising tides and
poisoned soils are already rewriting lives.
These stories compel us to ask, who bears the cost of progress?
How do we dismantle systems that
sacrifice communities to fuel consumption?
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