Reincarnation, Food & Memory: AMITAV GHOSH on What Connects Us in an Age of Climate Crisis

“Imagining with precision is a very fundamental part of my work. When I sit down to write about anything, whether it be The Hungry Tide in the Sundarbans, or let's say The Shadow Lines, or Ghost-Eye. It's very important for me to get the topography right, to get the outlay of the streets or the house exactly right so I can actually picture all of that in my head. It's very important for me to have a sort of pictorial sense of what I'm seeing and what I'm writing about. Before I can write about it, I need to see it, as it were. So that's absolutely fundamental to my craft. That's just how I go about it. Like the Sufis say—behind the apparent reality is a hidden or batin reality. “

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liutalks with Amitav Ghosh about his new novel, Ghost-Eye. The novel is about reincarnation, but also a lot more. In our conversation we talk about the need to address the terrible set of environmental and other crises we face, and the seeming foreclosure of the imagination by the obsession with technology and the future it offers to us. Instead, we look to how we can fashion beginnings out of endings, aided by a renewed sense of wonder, curiosity, and awe. We turn to the body, to the haptic, and perhaps most important, to food as more than simply nourishment. In all this, story-telling, the revival of connections between living beings, and a deep sense of other times and places are central.

(0:56) Planetary Crisis and Accelerating Disasters

(3:50) The Lasting Impact of The Hungry Tide

(5:00) Storytelling and the Existential Crisis

(8:26) Imagining with Precision in Literature

(12:46) The Denuded Human Existence and AI

(15:37) Artisanal Intelligence vs. Artificial Intelligence

(17:57) Food, Industrial Agriculture, and Memory

(21:16) Cultural Assimilation Through Cooking

(24:12) The Sociability and Joy of Cooking

(27:57) The Failure of the Humanities

(31:38) The Role of the Narrator

(35:27) Regaining Our Sense of Wonder

(37:04) Past Life Memories and Circular Temporality

Episode Website

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