Everyday Anthropocene and Multispecies Kinship in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Abstract

The term ‘everyday’ typically denotes the routine, mundane aspects of day-to-day life, embodying notions of normalcy, ordinariness, and familiarity. From this perspective, it stands as an antithesis to the unusual, strange, and extraordinary. However, the Anthropocene era—our current geological epoch marked by significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems—has radically transformed our understanding of the ‘everyday’. In this epoch, the everyday no longer signifies a realm of predictability and relatability; rather, it encompasses new environmental realities that are bizarre and unprecedented. Therefore, contemporary literary fiction is challenged to redefine its approach to realism to aptly reflect the altered everyday experiences of its characters within the Anthropocene context. This paper examines Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island (2019) as a literary manifestation of the ‘everyday Anthropocene’, a concept that recognises the Anthropocene not as a distant or abstract epoch but as an immediate, lived reality. The paper argues that the novel advocates for multispecies kinship as a vital survival strategy within the daily realities of the Anthropocene.