The Great Uprooting: Migration and Movement in the Age of Climate Change
Amitav Ghosh, Author
April 18, 2022 · 4:30 pm—6:00 pm · 100 Robertson Hall
Organized by the Program in South Asian Studies. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Council, the Center for Global India, the Environmental Humanities and Social Transformation Colloquium, Department of English, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of Anthropology
It has long been predicted that climate change will lead to large-scale displacements of population and mass migration. Is it possible to look at the European ‘migrant crisis’ of recent years through this prism? This, and many other related questions, prompted me to travel to migrant camps in Italy in 2017, to interview migrants whose languages I am familiar with: that is to say speakers of Bengali, Hindi, Urdu and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. This talk is an attempt to identify some of the underlying patterns in the stories I was told by the migrants, in their own languages.
