Narrating the Anthropocene and the Environmental Imagination. Amitav Ghosh, Nnedi Okorafor, Patricia Grace

This thesis will examine how Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) and Patricia Grace’s Potiki (1986) reshape the cultural and narrative representation of environmental crisis by challenging the discourse of the Anthropocene. By employing Elizabeth DeLoughrey's Allegories of the Anthropocene (2019) and Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement (2016) as foundational theoretical frameworks, the research will follow the pathways of the analysis of the novels through the lens of the unequal ecological vulnerability faced by different communities and countries around specific realities of the novels. Through Indigenous tradition, Africanfuturist theory, and myth-based transnational storytelling, the novels articulate relational concepts in which land, oceans, animals, and spiritual forces acquire agency. Gun Island connects folklore, climate migration, and the theme of environmental exploitation to demonstrate the entanglement of modernity with planetary crisis; Lagoon portrays Lagos as an extractive pressure zone transformed by multispecies and mythic interventions that challenge petro-capitalism; Potiki reveals how settler colonialism’s logic of land commodification generates both ecological and cultural dispossession. These novels function not only as critiques of the Anthropocene, but also as projects for futures that are more ecologically in harmony with the environment.