The Emerging Political Actors in the Anthropocene: Cosmopolitics of the Earthbounds in Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island

Abstract

The present article seeks to engender a much-needed political ecocriticism for our time. In doing so, it draws on Bruno Latour's notions of the political subject/agent in the Anthropocene. Having done that, it proposes an extrapolated version of Latour's earthbounds as the new political actors in the Anthropocene. In conformity with Latour, the present author holds that "Earthbound" does not refer to an identity. Nor does it refer to structural subjectivity. According to me, it is an onto-political redescription of humans, subjected to the limits articulated by Planetary boundaries. In its essence, earth-bound names an ontology as well as a cosmopolitics of a concerned yet debating public. As an ontology it posits that, at present or in the near future, the earth offers no exit for earthlings, who, having left the pages of Science Fiction, have now acquired a new meaning, i.e., all living beings of the earth. As a politics it refers to a journey from Modernity to Nonmodernity—towards a new democracy of human and nonhuman agents in the earth's Critical Zone, away from a space-faring cult of a Globalized world which is incommensurable with the figure of our planet, a limited, local, polluted, war-torn, and closed envelope where life has uniquely maintained habitable condition for the last 3.5 billion years. Although Latour argued that the Anthropocene issues have only seen a public as part of the problem, the present author holds that the earthbound public is gradually becoming part of the solution. Additionally, there exists a small body of fictions which depict/anticipate such a political moment. However, as such conclusions raise further questions about the mode of earthbound politics, the article extends those questions to the fictional matrix of Amitav Ghosh's Planetary novel Gun Island which delineates the cosmopolitical process of the earthbounds in the Anthropocene.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Environmental Humanities, 2026 · DOI ↗