Exclusivity

Abstract

Abstract How does contemporary nature prose dismantle the perception of an ethnically exclusive club? This chapter illustrates how writers of colour have accessed and revised literary traditions that historically have excluded them, and also, in the process, how they rework indigenous traditions that require us to question the construction of ‘the nonhuman environment’ in ways that both complement and challenge the ambivalent modes accounted for in the last chapter. In the texts considered here, the tensions and contradictions of hybrid cultural interactions also suggest connections, most especially in the ecological significance of mourning practices and responses to death. These practices can reveal how the dead reinvigorate the living, disavowing the impersonal aestheticization of death, forcing us to see the environment through the lens of human time and remembered injustice.