Abstract: The consensus in ecocriticism today is that deconstructing the human/nonhuman binary is crucial if we want humanity to care for the environment. Indeed, viewing the environment as something to which we are connected is seen as more conducive to producing an environmentalist consciousness than seeing it as something categorically other. By contrast, my ecocritical reading of Caryl Phillips' Cambridge (1991) reveals the extent to which nonhuman landscapes in Caribbean fiction are paradoxically represented as categorically other. In Phillips' novel, this reification of the binary works in tandem with sites of difference such as race and gender to expose how the very category of is constructed through this process of othering. Instead of discussing the environment as backdrop to the human affairs and relations that it may or may not influence, in Cambridge the environment operates as form of nature-function that echoes Michel Foucault's of authorship. For Foucault, the author is not the originator of meaning but function of discourse, of the set of assumptions that govern the production, circulation, classification, and consumption of texts. Similarly, the notion of nature-function challenges approaches that foreground the environment as pre-existing space that evolves outside of the subject and instead sees it as function of discourse. In Phillips' text, this discursively produced environment then goes on to produce the human subject. Keywords: ecocriticism, Caryl Phillips, Cambridge, environment, human ********** At first sight, Caryl Phillips' fiction may not be an obvious candidate for an ecocritical analysis. Indeed, unlike Caribbean writers like Wilson Harris or Derek Walcott, whose work explicitly engages with the environment, (1) Phillips seems interested in it only peripherally or insofar as it helps him provide context for his characters. At recent colloquium in Belgium, he inquired about ecocritical studies in way that revealed his lack of active engagement with the discipline. (2) I argue that an ecocritical study of his work is nonetheless in order in the same way as feminists have shown the study of gender as a social category of analysis (Scott 1053) to be relevant in texts in which gender is not mentioned explicitly. After all, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), classic work of feminist literary criticism, focuses exclusively on male writers who were not priori writing about gender politics, and Helene Cixous identifies her transgressive ecriture feminine as embodied by the writings of male authors such as James Joyce and Jean Genet. Similarly, I argue that Phillips' fiction lends itself to an ecocritical reading not because his texts showcase the environment as motif but because of his noted adeptness at exposing the construction of boundaries between self and other, male and female. Insofar as our understanding of the environment is predicated on culture/nature, human/nonhuman binary and Phillips masterfully deconstructs binaries throughout his work, it is therefore unsurprising that his fiction provides excellent fodder for an ecocritical analysis. Two of ecocriticism's significant impacts have been to show that humans are part and parcel of the very environment from which they had previously seen themselves as separate (3) and that the so-called nonhuman other is always already part of the human body (Timothy Morton's strange strangers and Donna Haraway's companion species, for example). For instance, William Cronon's anthology The Trouble With Wilderness (1995) was instrumental in raising consciousness about humanity's imbrication with the natural world in way that contested the elitist concept of Nature-as-tableau-in-natural-parks-for-the-rich that often defined the nineteenth century's environmentalist movement la John Muir. (4) Similarly, Morton's Ecology Without Nature (2007) and The Ecological Thought (2010) emphasize the interdependence of humanity and the environment in order to make people more accountable to an environment that is as much part of them as they are of it. …
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Jun 15, 2018
Kehinde Olukunmi Alawode + 2
Open Access