Ecocritical Analysis Research Articles

Urban ecology and the property rights of baboons

This paper examines the transdisciplinary field of urban ecology through a discussion of cities, their literary representation, the opportunism of nature, and urban sustainability. Starting from the premise that too many people squashed into too many cities is a recipe for a massive environmental disaster (the sixth extinction), this paper argues that literature can promote awareness of the benefits of urban ecology. An ecocritical analysis of The reluctant passenger: A novel (2003) by Michiel Heyns shows how this awareness can be promoted without either eco-proselytising or technical scientific discourse. Set in Cape Town in 1994, this rollicking satire on emerging post-apartheid South Africa has a distinctly urban environmental thread. The theme is introduced in the novel's epigraph and unfolds around the legal battle to save the habitat of the baboons or chacmas that live at Rocklands on Cape Point. The story of these baboons is used to support the paper's argument that urban ecology may offer part of the solution to the environmental crisis of the twenty-first century.

Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction: By Laura Barbas-Rhoden. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011. P. x, 176. Notes. Works Cited. Index. $74.95 cloth.

Reviewed by: Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction by Laura Barbas-Rhoden Scott M. DeVries Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction. By Laura Barbas-Rhoden. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011. Pp. x, 176. Notes. Works Cited. Index. $74.95 cloth. Among several recent collections of essays and single-author books with ecocritical analyses of Spanish- and Portuguese-language texts, Laura Barbas-Rhoden’s study of several recent works of fiction by Latin American authors who employ the “ecological imagination” represents an important entry in the catalogue of regionally focused eco-criticism. Barbas-Rhoden identifies several unique elements of ecocritical approaches to Latin American literature, but the most effective contribution is her extensive attention to historical contexts and her intended goal of providing a “broad sweep of environmental history as apprehended through fiction” (p. 2). The analysis achieves this aim through the consideration of novels set in three distinct regions of Latin America: extreme southern Argentina (Tierra del Fuego by Sylvia Iparraguirre, Un piano en Bahía desolación by Libertad Demitrópulos, and Fuegia by Eduardo Belgrano [End Page 566] Rawson); the Amazon (Mad María by Márcio Souza, Fordilandia by Eduardo Sguiglia, and Un viejo que leía novelas de amor by Luis Sepúlveda); and Central America (Murámonos Federico by Joaquín Gutiérrez, Calypso by Tatiana Lobo, La loca de Gandoca by Anacristina Rossi, ¿En quién piensas cuando haces el amor? by Homero Aridjis, and Waslala by Gioconda Belli). For each chapter, Barbas-Rhoden provides an excellent contextualization of the novels with respect to historical, social, and economic factors, for example, British neocolonialism, land-use politics, the development of export-led economies in the region, and subsequent environmental alterations within the landscapes where the novels are set. For example, the section on Rossi’s novel exhaustively documents the roles played by various interested parties that either contested or welcomed the construction of an eco-tourist resort in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Reserve in Costa Rica. These include a Canadian investor (Maurice Strong), national and local politicians, and the Kèköldi people and other residents of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. Barbas-Rhoden also manages geographical and economic concepts effectively to construct a multilayered environmental history for the three regions represented in the literary texts she has selected for analysis. But the attention that Barbas-Rhoden devotes to historical contexts also represents something of a minor problem for the book. The title makes reference to “ecological imaginations,” but I found the ecocriticism somewhat lacking. The explicit environmentalism in Aridjis, Belli, and Rossi must force an ecocritical reading and Barbas-Rhoden indeed employs that approach (especially, eco-feminism) in the sections dedicated to those novels. Yet, she writes that the most important element in Mad María “is the criticism of modernization born of collaborations between American investors and Latin American politicians” (p. 68). Sometimes a critic may allow readers to infer the connection between his or her analysis and whatever the principal approach may be within a monograph, especially if that approach is named in the title. But in this case, the idea of an “ecological imagination” does not make an appearance in the analysis of Souza’s novel. On the contrary, Barbas-Rhoden claims that the Brazilian author does not employ “ecocentric depictions” and that “contemporary environmental rhetoric does not color his portrayal of the Amazon” (p. 70). Later, she mentions that in both Mad Maria and Sguiglia’s Fordilandia the “best practices for the future of human and non-human nature are not clear, and neither is the ecocritical message” (pp. 97–98). Throughout most of her book the focus is on various social and political concerns, but connections specific to ecological issues are not fully pursued. On one occasion in the analysis of the novel by Demitrópulos, there is reference to “a pressing question about the nature of civilization and barbarism” but the answer is not forthcoming, only the observation that it “bears further analysis from an ecocritical perspective” (p. 47). My concern is that in a book whose title centers on “ecological imaginations” such analysis should be the central focus, not something that bears further consideration elsewhere...

Knowing and Being in Eco-critical Visions of Carpentaria: Escaping Anthropocentricism in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) is a highly significant event in Australian Literature, winning the 2007 Australian Literary Society Gold Medal among many other awards. The story constructs various fictional and real contemporary, historical, and Indigenous mythological events in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria in tropical, far northern Australia. It examines themes such as frontier violence, land rights, deaths in custody, impacts of mining, activism and the Dreaming. Yet, its potential to influence the mindsets of sustainability exist beyond the literary, because while the novel is an exploration of the regionally specific perspective of its author, a member of the Waanyi nation of the Gulf, it also stands in metonymic eco-critical significance for all Australians. For the gulf country, with its extremes in seasonal shifts, experiencing flooding rains, cyclones, and intense heat and aridity presages the vulnerable future for all of Australia during climate change. This is painfully ironic, given that Australia is recognised as one of the most unsustainable and most environmentally vulnerable continents (WWF Living Planet Report 2010). There is, it is clear, recourse in Indigenous epistemologies. This paper investigates how Carpentaria, with its epic scope and experimental structure, suggests a new poetics and discourse for human engagement with the environment. The non-Indigenous reader is immersed in a startling and transforming story. The poetics constructing the novel normalises both cyclical temporality and communal cognition. The narrative incorporates climate and landscape as character rather than simply backdrop setting. Most importantly, it offers a non-didactic warning against human hubris in environmental interaction. This paper, using eco-critical analyses, proposes that such aesthetically innovative and compelling construction of narrative operates to dilute the anthropocentric nature/culture divide, a divide arguably at the heart of human destruction of the environment.

Anthropocentrism and Its Subversion: An Ecocritical Analysis of Milton Hatoum’s Translated Novel The Brothers

Este artigo objetiva questionar o conceito de desenvolvimento através de uma análise ecocrítica do impacto que o expansionismo ocidental causou na região amazônica, rompendo fronteiras comerciais, mas criando fronteiras humanas.

The Cartography of Memory: An Ecocritical Reading of Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

As reader, I have traveled with Toni Morrison. I have gone to Shalimar, Virginia, to Lorain, Ohio, to Ruby, Oklahoma to Danville, Pennsylvania. I have journeyed to City, Bottom, Sweet Home, Isle des Chevaliers, Solomon's Leap, and Up Beach. I have visited 124 Bluestone Road, One Monarch Street, Not Doctor Street, Lenox Avenue, Convent, L'Arbe de la Croix. And in summer of 2008, I went with Toni Morrison and The Toni Morrison Society to Sullivan's Island. We journeyed to Low Country to place commemorative bench on shore where nearly half of all those who survived middle passage first set foot on American soil. The Society's by Project was sparked by Morrison's contention that nation is bereft of African American monuments: There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby. There's no 300-foot tower, there's no small bench by road (A Bench by Road 4). That Society chose Sullivan's Island as first inscription of that vision--the bench facing Atlantic with Africa behind it--elucidates coastal Sea Islands as an where place, water, and memory converge. In ceremony where libations were poured and wreaths offered to Charleston harbor, Morrison claimed: It's never too late to honor dead. Responding to Morrison's call by creating an outdoor memorial, Society implicitly recognized natural world as repository of African American cultural and literary history, an important gesture insofar as ecocriticism defined broadly as study of relationship between literature and physical environment (Glotfelty vxiii)--has routinely excluded African American history and texts. Ecocriticism was initially confined to Romantic poetry, wilderness narrative and nature by British and American authors (Garrard 4). As Deming and Savoy aver, [b]oth scientific and literary writing about nature, as traditionally defined, have not emphasized cultural difference as tool for seeing nature, place, and environment (5), and thus ecocritical analysis has largely been circumscribed to work of Anglo writers. By contrast, African American literary tradition situates place as politically charged topography, recognizing interwoven fabric of nature and culture (Deming and Savoy 14). (1) Including African American texts in canon of environmental literature expands contours of nature writing by reflecting natural world in culturally specific ways: Contemporary nature writing has moved beyond narratives of solitary encounter in wild to explore how people and cultures have been shaped by and have shaped (Deming and Savoy 6). This current trend finds an earlier analogue in work of African American writers, who persistently attended to their physical environments; indeed, slave narratives are deeply situated in place, for geography was definitive factor in determining free and slave status. In this way, navigation of environment--woods, swamps, and rivers constitutes major narrative event. Thus, encounters with nature--whether in form of rivers marking Mason-Dixon line, cosmos guiding way to freer landscapes, migrating birds flying north in summer, or moss growing on north side of tree trunks--underscore complex interweaving of freedom and slavery, as mapped onto social and physical topographies in slave narratives. Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is illustrative of contemporary African American ecocritical narrative insofar as memory, in novel, is written on water, humans, and land. In this way, representation of nature in novel is not as a pristine external scene but marriage of place with lives that have lived in it (Deming and Savoy 4). Specifically, Shange turns to environment--the Atlantic Ocean, Sea Islands, plants, and herbs--in her characterization of Indigo, central character in novel who is repeatedly elided with Southern coastal climate: she is sapling who is embraced by weeping willows; the land and salt-winds moved her through Charleston streets, and she has tough winding branches growing from her braids, deep green leaves rustling by her ears (4). …

Botanical nature writing: an ecocritical analysis

INTRODUCTION The background of the present article lies in the American tradition of ecocritical literary studies and in a concept central to it, nature writing. Our purpose is to detect the tradition of nature writing in Estonia and to analyse its characteristic traits on the example of a botany-focused book. In introducing the notion of nature writing (Finch & Elder, 2002) and applying ecocritical reading (Glotfelty & Fromm, 1996) on an exemplary text (Rebassoo, 1975a), we want to test the benefits of literary analysis for texts that have been regarded as popular science in Estonian reception and left without much critical response. There is a whole array of books on natural history that in some regard conform too little to the rules of popular science, but cannot be considered fiction either. The problem is that such texts have been written for decades, but they have not received much critical attention or feedback. The lack of conceptual tools is definitely one reason for this situation. Ecocritical interest in nature writing provides a context for re-actualizing a wide range of previously under-conceptualized publications. As a recently developed approach in literary theory that focuses on human-environment relationships (Buell, 1995; Love, 2003; Murphy, 2009), ecocriticism has taken nature writing as one of the central types of literature studied with its methods. In the Anglo-American tradition, the notions such as wilderness, experience of sublime, solitude, pastoral, and apocalypse have been central for the scholars analysing such texts (Garrard, 2009). One of the distinctive traits of the Estonian tradition of nature writing is a strong scientific background of its authors (Tuur & Maran, 2005). Scientific names, data, and explanations are routinely provided as comments to the immediate observations of natural phenomena. At the same time, such texts cannot be approached as academic papers as the writer's subjective persona is ever present in them. The solution we are offering in the present article is to consider such texts as nature writing. The dynamic model of nature writing is introduced and applied, demonstrating some possibilities of ecocritical analysis. MATERIAL AND METHODS Source material The source material for the present study is a book based on botanical fieldwork notes that resembles a diary rather than a research text. The author Haide-Ene Rebassoo (b. 1935) is an Estonian botanist who has published extensively on Estonian plants, plant communities, their distribution and protection; she has written chapters for encyclopaedic collections and accounts of plants for a wider public (for her bibliography, see Kukk, 1999). The present article focuses on her book titled Botaanilisi kilde 17 Hiiumaa suvest [Botanical Fragments from 17 Summers in Hiiumaa] (further referred to as BF), published in 1975. Unlike the majority of the books issued during the Soviet period, this one does not have an annotation on its impressum page. It is merely indicated that 10 000 copies of the book were printed. No reviews of the book appeared in periodicals. As the title of the book suggests, flora and botanical knowledge are the focus of the text. The time span specified in the title is 17 summers. Each year's accounts are limited to summer, or at least to the vegetation period, as this is the most suitable time for botanical explorations. The setting is specified as the island of Hiiumaa, North-West Estonia. At the beginning of the book, a hand-drawn map of Hiiumaa is presented (Fig. 1), showing the natural features of the island (rivers, swamps, islets) and the approximate locations of the settlements mentioned in the text. The elements of the natural environment are brought to the fore; no roads are marked on the map. BF has three inserted sections of black and white plant photographs, each section containing 41 to 44 photos, 129 in total. …

Arboreal dialogics: an ecocritical exploration of Octavia Butler's Dawn

Critical essays postulating Octavia Butler's myriad literary works abound. However, ecocritical perspectives through which these assessments occur are few. Moreover, ecocritical analyses as they relate to Afro-diasporic histories have been sparsely developed. In this piece the author argues for a hybrid African Diasporic/ecocritical assessment of Butler's Dawn in three dynamic sections: ‘New beginnings’, ‘Metamorphoses/polymorphisms’ and ‘Science fiction/speculative fiction and Afrofuturism’. The first section syntactically critiques the book's – and trilogy's – title(s), and how they relate to notions of hegemony. The second section mediates self-identity in relation to social and ecological environments, particularly corporeal invasion and colonial subjectivities. Finally, the third section highlights the Afro-Diasporic voice represented in Dawn and its relation to cultural memories. Through these topics, the author not only explores ecological dialogics presented by Butler, but also intersections between gender, culture, society and nature – transcending traditional binaries in order to present a heteroglossia of ecocritical critiques.

The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination by Lawrence Buell

MLR, 102. I, 2007 I9I the victim, themourner, and the survivor. The range of issues explored in the book inconnection with Electra's anti-Oedipal model of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity range fromhysteria to nostalgia, anarchy, and the feminist politics ofmourning and of renewal. Scott's sophisticated and nuanced readings of Electra provide fascinating insights into the profound impact of psychoanalysis on modernist literature and thought. The juxtaposition of literaryversions of themyth from theGerman and theAnglo American traditions also provides a useful platform for comparison and contrast. The largely historicist and feminist approaches adopted in the book yield powerful readings of the reception of Electra's myth, though at times one is left towonder why, for instance, Strauss's Elektra had such a huge impact outside the immediate historical context offin de siecleVienna, orwhy the interestof the twenty-first century in amodernist Electra should be anything other than historical. Given the rigour of analysis in themain body of thebook, some of theattemptsmade in the introduction to present Electra as a 'blank slate' (p. I I) in opposition toOedipus or as a figure largely ignored by authors before the twentieth century seem unnecessary and rather unconvincing. Although I agree with the claim that the limited theoretical attention theElectra complex has received isprobably fortuitous, leaving as itdoes room for the proliferation of treatments of the heroine in fictional narrative, the reverse does not quite hold true forOedipus. His appropriation by psychoanalysis has not been detrimental tohis reception in literatureand the artsbut enabling.What isdistinctive about the interest in thepost-Freudian Electra isnot somuch a quantitative difference fromher reception in earlier centuries but a qualitative one. Similarly, issues of char acterization, morality, and closure in plays such as Sophocles' Electra (or Seneca's Agamemnon, a noticeable absence from the book) cannot be debated outside the long and complex history of their interpretations. Despite such objections, I have found Scott's book very stimulating and informative.Together with Kathleen L. Komar's Reclaiming Klytemnestra: Revenge or Reconciliation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), which must have appeared too late for theauthor to take intoconsidera tion, it is a valuable addition to thegrowing body of studies on the changing fortunes of theHouse ofAtreus in twentieth-century literature and thought. UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL PANTELIS MICHELAKIS The Future ofEnvironmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagina tion. By LAWRENCE BUELL. (Blackwell Manifestos) Oxford: Blackwell. 2005. X+195 PP. ? I5.99. ISBN 978-1-4051-2476-8. The titleof Lawrence Buell's latest contribution to the field more commonly known as ecocriticism signals both his own and thediscipline's shiftaway from thenarrower focus on thenatural environment suggested by theprefix 'eco', and towards a broader, more hybrid conception of environment that includes the urban, the interweave of built and natural dimensions, and the interpenetration of global and local pressures. Consistent with the project of the series inwhich it appears, The Future ofEn vironmental Criticism functions as an excellent critical introduction to the field of environmental criticism and posits, through a timely reminder that environmental crisis is a broadly cultural issue, the importance of the field for twenty-first-century humanities. The book isdivided into four main sections which discuss theemergence of contemporary environmental criticism (Chapter i), and threeof itsdistinctive con cerns: issues of environmental representation (Chapter 2), its interest in reconception of place as a fundamental of both art and lived experience (Chapter 3), and itsstrong ethical and political commitment (Chapter 4). I92 Reviews Throughout thebook, Buell works hard toestablish the scholarly credentials of his field of enquiry (though on occasion his approach is rather heavy-handed, e.g. the eco-ing of Jameson and Foucault in the section titles 'Ecocentrism and itsDiscon tents' and 'TheWorld, theText and theEcocritic') and to rid itof the spectre of 'what superficially seems an old-fashioned propensity for "realistic" modes of representa tion' (p. 3 i).Here he provides an equable and reasoned reply toDana Phillips's recent attack on his work, but although his illustrative exposition of ecocritical analysis in Chapters 2 and 3 encompasses an exploration of how literarygenres not tradition ally addressed by environmental critics (such as utopian narrative and science fiction) imagine theworld and particularize environmentality, the canon upon which...

Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation: A Practitioner's View by Phyllis Zatlin

I92 Reviews Throughout thebook, Buell works hard toestablish the scholarly credentials of his field of enquiry (though on occasion his approach is rather heavy-handed, e.g. the eco-ing of Jameson and Foucault in the section titles 'Ecocentrism and itsDiscon tents' and 'TheWorld, theText and theEcocritic') and to rid itof the spectre of 'what superficially seems an old-fashioned propensity for "realistic" modes of representa tion' (p. 3 i).Here he provides an equable and reasoned reply toDana Phillips's recent attack on his work, but although his illustrative exposition of ecocritical analysis in Chapters 2 and 3 encompasses an exploration of how literarygenres not tradition ally addressed by environmental critics (such as utopian narrative and science fiction) imagine theworld and particularize environmentality, the canon upon which he draws most heavily throughout-Carson, Leopold, Dillard, and Berry-does demonstrate a bias towards a literalmode of representation. It is in the discussion of the emergence and evolution of the discipline that the real strength of thebook lies and where Buell is most successful in achieving his goal of providing 'a concise, accessible road map of trends, emphases and controversies within green literary studies more generally' (p. vii), a discussion amply comple mented by thebook's comprehensive and lucid glossary. The finalchapter provides a particularly illuminating survey of current polarizations within the movement: taking as his point of departure thedivergence between the first-waveessays ofCheryll Glot feltyand Harold Fromm's The Ecocriticism Reader (Athens: University ofGeorgia Press, I996) and JoniAdamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein's corrective up date, The EnvironmentallJustice Reader (Tucson: University ofArizona Press, 2002), Buell charts the rapid progress of the discipline through a three-step development fromdeep-ecology toecofeminism and, finally,environmental justice before turning, ostensibly, to address the future of the field inhis short conclusion. Here, rather than a prophecy about the futureof environmental criticism promised in the title,Buell offersan even-handed interim report on the state of the discipline, concluding that its legacy will lie not in the field ofmethodological innovation, nor in theproduction of a titanicwork of criticism, but in its success in establishing en vironmentality as a permanent concern for thehumanities. One cannot help thinking that a better title,and one consonant with other volumes in theBlackwell Manifestos series,would have been The Idea ofEnvironmental Criticism. For what Buell's work offers is an extremelymethodical, accessible, and timely introduction to the fieldof environmental criticism forspecialists and non-specialists alike, a teasing insight into ecocriticism atwork, and an excellent exposition of the development and evolution of the discipline in its most recentmanifestations. UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL RUTH GLYNN Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation: A Practitioner's View. By PHYLLIS ZATLIN. Clevedon, Buffalo, and Toronto: Multilingual Matters. 2005. xii+ 222 pp. $89.95; ?49.95 (pbk $39.95; ?I9.95). ISBN 978-I-85359-833-3 (pbk 978-I-85359-832-6). Helping to redress the relative paucity of critical texts available on the translation of drama, Phyllis Zatlin's new study is, as its title implies, two delightful and informa tivebooks inone: the first,a practical guide to thecontext-specific strategies involved in the translation ofworks for the stage; the second, a consideration of the discrete modes of adapting drama to or from narrative, film, and television. Managing to embrace both prescriptive-productive and descriptive-historical approaches to these arts,Zatlin stands unequivocally on the side of drama translation for thepurposes of performance, showing impatience with the more 'academic' exercise of rendering the atrical textsprimarily for reading.This will come as little surprise to thosewho know MLR, I02. I, 2007 I93 Zatlin as the formergeneral editor of theESTRENO Plays series of contemporary Spanish drama in translation and as the tireless translator ofmore than twentyplays fromSpanish and French. The author takes themajority of examples illustrating her views on translating theatre from Spanish-language texts, though these have been carefully chosen to reflect larger issues involved in the enterprise. Zatlin firmly proposes thata translation should read-that is,play-like an original text,and that a theatre translatormust attend to questions beyond those of interlin gual transfer.This entails, for instance, attention towhat Susan Bassnett has called the 'gestic text' ('Still Trapped in the Labyrinth...

W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright: Toward an Ecocriticism of Color

W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright:Toward an Ecocriticism of Color Scott Hicks (bio) Scholars working in the field of ecocriticism in American literary studies have come to see that their most important task in the coming years is to take up and engage the cultural productions of peoples of color, especially African Americans. Such a transformation entails exploring and theorizing not just African American fictional and nonfictional narratives, but also African American critical and theoretical works that undergird and explicate other forms of cultural production. Currently, the forebearers of ecocriticism—"the study of literature as if the environment mattered" (Mazel 1)—seem to be an unassailable who's who of American nature writing: Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Rachel Carson. To this pantheon I here would like to add a couple unlikely characters—W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. For as Kathleen Wallace and Karla Armbruster rightly point out, it now behooves literary critics to "question . . . why so few African American voices are recognized as part of nature writing and ecocriticism" (2). To ignore African American voices is to risk the field's ultimate demise, as Paul Tidwell argues: In short, ecocriticism was founded on a too limited canon of writings based on too narrow a definition of nature writing . . . Ecocritics who continue to resist or reject African American concepts as foreign to their concerns risk a hardening of their developing discourse into a reactionary and racist defense of an essentialized idea of nature. ("The Blackness of the Whale") Not only must ecocritics reread the fiction of African Americans ecocritically; they must also reread African American critics and thinkers ecocritically, so that all might begin to reformulate the questions and revise the assumptions that undergird the field. Any ecocritical methodology of African American literature must necessarily entail an ecocritical analysis of foundational African American critics and thinkers—not just, and not merely, white American ones. To do so offers the potential to reread literature as if the environment mattered differently. To recuperate or claim Du Bois and Washington as environmentally conscious thinkers symbolizes an important step in beginning that transformation. Regardless of what one thinks of Washington or Du Bois, it is undeniable that these two men, in myriad ways, have framed America's twentieth-century discourse of race relations. [End Page 202] Consequently, an ecocritical analysis of Washington's Up From Slavery (1901) and Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) offers a means of deepening critical understanding of their relationship to environmental awareness, in that such consciousness participates in ecocritically reimagining subsequent African American texts. As a "case study" for such a reimagining, I turn to the prominent fiction and nonfiction of novelist, essayist, and memoirist Richard Wright. This essay begins to reconstruct a genealogy of African American ecocriticism, putting Du Bois, Washington, and Wright into creative tension in order to begin to sketch a portrait of an early twentieth-century ecocriticism of color. In so doing, it asks critics to be conscious of various environments (urban, rural, and suburban, and the miscegenation and marginalization therein) as well as be attuned to the political ramifications of social justice, justice not just for the clichéd redwoods and spotted owls, but for communities and cultures as well. The problem for ecocriticism, say some of its leading practitioners, is its fealty to what today are restrictive definitions and premises, particularly in regard to concerns of race and ethnicity—though its attention to environmental concerns in the late 1970s and early 1980s sounded a much-needed alarm about the health of the planet. As scholars such as Robert D. Bullard and Carolyn Merchant have shown since, though, environmental crises reflect, and cohere along, racial and gender lines, thus demonstrating the importance of "intersectional" ways of thinking "green"—with race and racism a critical axis. Such an attention to race demands a reconfigured consciousness of both the cultural and the political expressions of environmentalism—and such a reconfiguration requires ecocriticism's practitioners to rethink their conceptualizations of environmentalism. Said John Elder at the 1995 conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, "Just as...

Farther afield in the study of nature-oriented literature

In the 1990s, the emerging field of ecocriticism nature-sensitive literary studies began to establish and define itself. Arguing that the field has matured to the point where it requires a thorough critique and new theoretical underpinnings, Patrick D. Murphy suggests a variety of ways ecocriticism can become more inclusive in its objects of study and more sophisticated in its methodologies.According to Murphy, ecocriticism in the United States has been too narrowly associated with the study of nonfiction. To broaden the field's purview, he proposes a new taxonomy that draws an important distinction between nature writing a nonfiction essay form descended from Henry David Thoreau nature literature, which includes fiction and poetry, and environmental literature, which is inspired by and concerned with a threatened natural world. He also urges ecocritics to expand their study to international literature, and he proceeds to survey nature-oriented prose from Central America, the Caribbean, southern Africa, Spain, and Japan.On a theoretical level, Murphy addresses the relationship of ecofeminism to postmodernism and provides interpretations of contemporary American multicultural and women's literature, including works by Gary Snyder, Simon Ortiz, Jane Brox, Pat Mora, Lori Anderson, Nora Naranjo-Morse, Sallie Tisdale, and Terry Tempest Williams. Applying his theories of ecocritical analysis to underappreciated or unknown literature, especially fiction and poetry by American women writers of color, Murphy introduces his fellow critics to authors ripe for ecocritical analysis.Murphy's wide-ranging book will no doubt serve as a watershed in the development of ecocriticism.