Postcolonial Ecocriticism Research Articles

Conjuring the past: Slow violence and the temporalities of environmental rights tribunals

In his 2011 Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon argues that the ‘slow violence’ of environmental collapse - the too often ‘invisible’ violence that unfolds over decades or even centuries, from the acidification of the oceans to the radioactivity of depleted uranium – represents a formidable representational challenge for contemporary environmental activists. In an era in which ‘the media venerate the spectacular and when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need’, the challenges of making visible the ‘staggeringly discounted casualties’ associated with environmental destruction are both substantial and urgent (2011: 3). Based on ethnographic research with rights of nature activists in Peru and Australia, this paper analyses the narrative and performative strategies that are increasingly being experimented with at Rights of Nature Tribunals to subvert, extend, and otherwise complexify the spatio-temporalities of mainstream environmental policy making. Drawing on recent work in feminist posthumanism and post-colonial eco-criticism, I argue that these temporal tactics, while still largely marginal to hegemonic policy blocs, are raising important questions about the scalar habits and assumptions that continue to anchor much environmental policy-making.

Ecology in Paul Muldoon’s Postcolonial Poetry

This paper considers the place of ecology and environmentalist thought in Paul Muldoon’s postcolonial poetry. Employing the principles of postcolonial ecocriticism, the study throws light upon Muldoon’s poetical works where the Irish-American poet tries to preserve his native agricultural identity and tradition in face of the global Anglo-American culture. In most of his verse volumes, Muldoon mentions agrarian and green aspects as well as native rustic jargon, which helps enliven and strengthen his native Irish roots, and shield the Gaelic region’s distinct cultural and linguistic heritage. The poet’s portrayal of local landscape phenomena entails intellectual and emotional intimacy. He is personally attached to Irish ecological spots, and they are venues in which he finds a considerably remarkable meaning ,i.e., solid ground on which the anti-conquest’s cultural-lingual resistance stands. The private ( and public) worth of this georgic atmosphere helps foster both the poet’s and his natives’ stance against a plotted process of naturalization. Muldoon’s poems, too, show how postcolonial corporeal and cultural effect endeavours to boom throughout human and environmental worlds.

Ecophobia and the Porcelain Porcine Species

What has changed in the discipline of ecocriticism since Simon C. Estok’s explosive article “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia” first appeared in print in ISLE? What has shifted in institutionalized practices of ecophobia, a catch-all term for aversion to and avoidance of the nonhuman other. In the past ten years, Estok’s use of the term has gained currency. Most recently, Routledge published a full-length study of ecophobia by Estok, entitled The Ecophobia Hypothesis. It and other studies, particularly those situated in the new or burgeoning areas of postcolonial ecocriticism, Marxist ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and queer ecology, have addressed ecophobia by theorizing about the ideological links between it and intraspecies kinds of odium and dread. In contrast with this embrace of the concept, discussion of ecophobia does not appear in several recent and distinguished anthologies of ecocriticism. What, for example, is behind the omission of the topic in Hubert Zapf's Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino’s Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Joni Adamson’s Keywords for Environmental Studies. Given the importance of the term, these scholars at best look careless in their scholarship (and one hopes it is carelessness rather than ideological issues that are behind the omission, but one suspects the latter, since it is impossible to be ignorant of the profound and paradigm-rocking importance of the term “ecophobia”). Is the omission due in part to scholars’ “shrill reaction” (Brayton 205) to the article in which theorizing about ecophobia made a debut with a bang? Did they want to stay out of the fray of the debate between theory and practice and so eschew one of the key terms of that debate, for the term itself is a call for more “critical theory” in a discipline that took shape by distancing itself from “continental philosophy and its twentieth-century academic legacy” (205). Is the omission because “ecophobia” is too confrontational, brazen, accusatory, and shaming a term? With the exception perhaps of its Latinate syllables, there is little about the “ungainly neologism” (205) that is remotely discreet, euphemistic, conciliatory, charitable, or decorous. Unabashedly and unceremoniously, with little trace of refinement, piety, or good will, the term “ecophobia” calls out what society largely conceals, underplays, and underestimates. Using more sedate language to persuade society to embrace ecocentrism and reduce anthropocentrism might be more effective than an all-out verbal assault on society’s ecophobic and anthropocentric values, practices, and institutions. Yet, precisely because the term is brutally honest and confrontational, shaming, judgmental, and accusing, using it judiciously stands to productively contribute to the effort among environmentalists to nudge and haul society out of the rut of habitual abuses of the nonhuman ecogenic other. Critically engaging with the term might not bring about the end of what it names. However, such engagement would, and already is, bringing more attention to scores of ecophobic practices. Perfectly legal today, they may be criminalized in the future because of that attention, consigned to the dung heap in the form of thick legal tomes, shunned in practice, and shelved for the record. For literary studies scholars, teaching and studying texts by examining either their ecophobic content or their rebuke of it is an obvious strategy for making “ecophobia” and its like (for example, “speciesism” and “ecocide”) household words in schools, offices, airports, gas stations, corner stores, food courts, and shopping malls. I illustrate that work here towards the end of this article, in a brief reading of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a text that screams out ecophobia in the context of pig killing. Ecophobia in the twenty-first century is vaster and more insidious and more pervasive than it was in Golding’s time, and it is as monstrous an institution as the enslavement, trafficking, and commodification of human flesh.

Effects of the Environmental Exploitation of Postcolonial Nations and a Possible View to Explore Alternatives: Reading Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place as “Postcolonial Ecocriticism”

Effects of the Environmental Exploitation of Postcolonial Nations and a Possible View to Explore Alternatives: Reading Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place as “Postcolonial Ecocriticism”

From “Meat Culture” to “Cultured Meat”: Critically Evaluating the Contested Ontologies and Transformative Potential of Biofabricated Animal Material on Culture and Law

This article calls into question how different the parallel ontologies of meat are in terms of the realities they enact. It argues that while biofabricated animal material is expected to transform the production and consumption of meat, the material’s ontologies reinforce existing interrelationships between the dominant meat culture and the law. Additionally, the expectations surrounding biofabricated animal material vests the material with transformative power, even though it does not challenge the structural factors, namely law and culture, which underlie the exploitation and commodification of animals. I begin by delineating the co-constituting relationship between law, the realities of meat production and consumption, and meat culture. I then unpack the interface between different ontologies of meat and consider why the contest has taken place in legal terrains. From here, I consider the key expectations that have assigned transformative power to biofabricated animal material. I suggest that these expectations work to reinforce existing meat culture, and the configurations of power that benefit from it, as supported via legal instruments.

HAWAII�S ECOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM: POSTCOLONIAL ECOCRITICISM READING ON KIANA DAVENPORT�S SHARK DIALOGUES

Recent studies of postcolonialism have explored the interconnection between postcolonial and environmental/eco-criticism. Studies from Huggan (2004), Nixon (2005), Cilano and DeLoughrey (2007) counter the underlying assumption that these criticisms stand in opposition toward each other by pointing out the overlapping areas of interest between postcolonial and ecocriticism and the complementary aspect of these two criticisms (Buell, 2011). Postcolonial ecocriticism, as theorized by Huggan and Tiffin (2010) and DeLoughrey and Handley (2011) asserts the intertwined correlation between environmental degradation and the marginalization of the minority/indigenous ethic groups which inhabit a particular place. The underlying capitalist and mechanistic ideologies in which nature is perceived only of their intrinsic values and usefulness toward (Western) humans illustrates total disregard to the original owner of the colonized land, the indigenous people. This perspective is underlined by Serpil Oppermanns (2007) concept of ecological imperialism to underline the anthropocentric perspective that legitimate Western domination toward the colonies natural resources. Although discussion of postcolonial ecocriticism has encompassed diverse regions such as Caribbean, Africa and Asia, scant attention has been given toward Pacific archipelago especially Hawaii. Through reading on Kiana Davenports Shark Dialogues (1994), this paper explores how American colonialism results in ecological imperialism in this island chain. It is hoped that this analysis can contribute toward enriching the discussion on postcolonial ecocriticism.DOI: 10.24071/ijhs.2019.020202

A Postcolonial-Ecocritical Perspective on Modern American Literature

This paper provides a postcolonial ecocritical perspective on modern American novel. It relates and examines aspects of ecological and human violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian : The Evening Redness in the West (1985) and Anne Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been (2007). The paper argues that while McCarthy represents examples of ethnic and racial violence and Pancake focuses on class violence, the two novelists articulate a particular awareness of the interconnections between economic and political hierarchy and different forms of ecological and human violence within different American contexts. The two novels, then, denounce the deterministic, colonial constructions of economy, power and knowledge in modern societies on the one side and the validation of antagonism and violence against otherness and difference on the other. The paper argues further that colonizing countries as well as colonized countries still suffer, at different levels, the discrepancies and contradictions within colonial culture and politics. The two novels expose the limitations of white Americans’ freedom, and equality within colonial and national frameworks. This paper specifically examines the psychological-mental challenges and changes of the fifteen-years-old female teenager, Bant in Strange as This Weather Has Been and the male teenager, the kid, in Blood Meridian as exemplifying how specific individuals and groups through their ecological awareness try to deconstruct such deterministic, colonial constructions of identity and violence. Keywords: Violence; identity; difference; postcolonial ecocriticism

Die Rückkehr der ›Gesellschaft‹ in die Kulturwissenschaft

Abstract Coinciding with the cultural turn in the humanities, a critical discussion in literary studies has begun in recent years that relates to the problems of rejecting social questions and an associated turning away from social history. Against the backdrop of this debate, my research report offers an overview of the conceptual possibilities and methodological problems in a ›return of society‹ within medieval philology. This is based on three established research areas of socio-historical literary studies: postcolonial literary criticism, literary ecocriticism and literary economics.

Dispossession, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, and Doris Lessing’sThe Grass is Singing

Dispossession, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, and Doris Lessing’s<i>The Grass is Singing</i>

“They’ve killed the dogs!”: Land, literature and canines in contemporary Zimbabwe

This article explores the positioning of the dog in representations of farm takeovers in Zimbabwe between 2000 and 2017. It highlights the localised embeddedness of animal lives within social processes at a specific juncture of postcolonial history. The article focuses particularly on this moment marked by abrupt reversals of power, geographical distributions of people and animals, and the erasure of many physical and psychological borderlines. It focuses particularly on two novels, Graham Lang’s Place of Birth (2006) and Ian Holding’s Unfeeling (2005). It examines ways in which dogs feature as both physical presences and as psychological refractors for human responses to the violent invasions depicted in these novels. Animals of all kinds have been largely neglected in studies of the land-appropriation process, and the article gestures towards the fruitful combination of animal studies and an historically-situated, multispecies, postcolonial ecocriticism.

The pristine past, the plundered present: Nature as lost home in Tanure Ojaide’s poetry

Tanure Ojaide is a major voice of post-war Nigerian poetry in English, distinguished by his recourse to the orature of his birthplace. Ojaide takes orature as a locus of an aesthetics that is cognizant of the arts and politics of rural people, especially in the face of a modernity-driven, viperous establishment. His poetry’s dependence on orality, I argue, implies its rootedness in nature. But far more crucial to this article is the contention that nature in Ojaide’s poetry is not merely evoked as an aesthetic strategy — an embellishment of what many have regarded as an overwhelming political theme in his poetry. Nature (the natural environment, biodiversity, flora and fauna) is also thematized as home — now a lost home in the face of modernity and petrodollar global capitalism. In the context of postcolonial ecocriticism, I attempt a reading of his poetry to point out that the nature (environment) of the Niger Delta region where the poet hails from is, just like the people inhabiting it, a victim of exploitation and oppression caused by large-scale oil exploration in the region; and it is no longer the pristine home it used to be.

An Eco-Critical Analysis of Climate Change and the Unthinkable in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction and Non-Fiction

In his work of non-fiction The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh examines the inability of the present generation to grasp the scale of climate change in the spheres of Literature, History and Politics. The central premise in this work of non-fiction is based on the statement that literature will one day be accused of its complicity with the great derangement and of blind acceptance of the climate crisis. This paper will study how Ghosh’s fictional and non-fictional enterprise voices a call for more imaginative and cultural forms of fiction that articulate resistance against materialism that can destroy our planet. We shall see how Ghosh’s fictional enterprise falls within the sphere of postcolonial eco-criticism that considers the phenomenon of “material eco-criticism”. I shall also reveal Ghosh’s environmental advocacy in his works of fiction, The Ibis Trilogy and The Hungry Tide. This paper will analyze how the Ibis Trilogy is not just an exploration of the particularly heinous operation of imperial power leading up to the Opium Wars but is also an eco-critical narrative that articulates resistance against the violence of climate change. A study of The Hungry Tide will also reveal how this hybrid literary text is both a historical account of the Marichjhapi massacre and a plea to preserve the eco-system of our time. I shall thus consider the challenges that climate change poses for the postcolonial writer and the evolving grid of literary forms that shape the narrative imagination.

The Loss of Context and Its Reconstruction: The Location of Postcolonial Ecocriticism in Jhumpa Lahiri’s _The Lowland_

The Loss of Context and Its Reconstruction: The Location of Postcolonial Ecocriticism in Jhumpa Lahiri’s _The Lowland_

Re-Creation of Tribals: Debt, Bonded Slavery and Bonded Prostitution in Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps

Bonded labor or bonded slavery and bonded prostitution in India is a legacy left by British colonialism. Under this system, a person has to fall into servitude to whomever he or she has loaned money from with no means of repaying that debt. Mahasweta Devi has raised this social phenomenon in her writing, demonstrating that tribal people are those who have been victimized by this system. This study explores the issue of bonded slavery and bonded prostitution by analyzing two stories from Devi’s Imaginary Maps. This literary work depicts the plight of tribal communities as a result of the exploitation of their natural and human resources by colonizers and domestic capitalists. Those exploiters have alienated themselves from nature, considering themselves not to be part of nature but people who can use nature to increase their wealth. The depletion of nature leads to the victimization of the tribal communities. Through the lens of Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Imaginary Maps condemns the colonizers and domestic capitalists for destroying the tribes’ forests which serve as a motherly provider for their communities. This destruction forces communities to change their way of life. Money becomes a necessity and causes many tribal members to borrow money from moneylenders. Unable to repay the debt, they become bonded laborers and bonded prostitutes and are seriously exploited and abused. Imaginary Maps serves as a channel through which the tribal voice is heard, depicting the relationship between colonialism, neocolonialism, domestic capitalists, ecology and the tribal communities. From being free subjects, both nature and the tribes are re-created as bonded slaves.

Postcolonial Ecocriticism and the African Response to Human Experience and the Environment

Postcolonial ecocriticism is a theory that looks at both the environment and people, how both are interconnected, reflect and define each other. Writers symbolically use wholesome social environment to indicate spiritual and moral vivacity of a society while unhealthy environment shows exploitation, extreme materialism, moral decadence, and spiritual ineptitude of a society. This paper looks at Postcolonial ecocriticism as a local response to global environmental issues, and also explores the colonial impact and legacy on human and nonhumans in Africa. The paper is reliant on Postcolonial ecocriticism and uses Frantz Fanon’s thoughts in Wretched of the Earth as the theory that guides the analysis of Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s I will Marry When I Want and Athol Fugard’s Sorrows and Rejoicing. The plays serve as the primary texts of this research paper. Thus, this paper will look at the interconnectedness of humans and nonhumans in the two select plays. The paper specifically sees Postcolonial ecocriticism as Africa’s local response to the global environmental writings that have occluded the issue of colonialism and displacement. The paper also establishes a connection between the anthropos and nonhuman elements in African drama.

AFRICA'S NATURAL HERITAGE AND ECOLOGICAL VISION IN THE WORK OF BART WOLFFE

In this paper I use postcolonial ecocriticism to show that, although Bart Wolffe laments en­vironmental injustice in his writing, he embraces a contradictory ecological vision and fails to expose and tackle the entangled nature of oppression. Wolffe says almost nothing about injustices amongst humans in the postcolonial context within which his work was written. He fails to acknowledge that injustices amongst humans lead to injustice against nature. He also depicts an imperialist outlook that either sees Africa as a blank space ready for occupation or sees Africans as a blemish on apristine and unspoiled landscape untouched by westernisation and industrialisation.

At the Intersection of Ecocriticism and the Colonial Maghreb: Antoine Delesvaux and Joann Sfar’s Le chat du rabbin

In the animation of The Rabbi’s Cat by Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux (2011), the speaking feline protagonist translates ideas between species and ethnicities, blurring lines of demarcation between animals and humans, and pointing the viewer in the direction of French ecocritics who exhort us to reinvent these lines (Bailly, Lestel). In examining agency, conditions, the politics of speech, and the gift, this article explores the proliferation of the-hybrid (Latour) that dissolves the limits between subject and object while articulating two fields of study: postcolonial Maghrebi studies and ecocriticism.

Stories of the Ainu: The Oldest Indigenous People in Japanese Children’s Literature

The Ainu are Japan’s oldest indigenous people, and they have survived and maintained their culture from the Late Paleolithic Period through today. However, the Japanese government did not formally recognize the Ainu until 2008. The visibility of the Ainu in literature is limited, especially in realism-based genres such as historical fiction and contemporary realistic fiction, but they do appear in fantasy stories and traditional folk literature. The Ainu play the role of familiar strangers in Japanese children’s literature. Arjun Appadurai argues that imagination has grown a collective social product while fantasies are private and even individual (7). The idea of the Ainu as neighbors in Japanese nationhood has appeared in the literary world as collective forms of imagination in which they are depicted as ancient, mysterious people who are deep parts of nature. Using Appadurai’s distinction between imagination and fantasy and a framework of postcolonial ecocriticism, we studied representations of the Ainu in Japanese picture books. Laura Wright examines the ways that authors of fiction represent postcolonial landscapes and environmental issues and how “the realm of the imaginary” is positioned within postcolonialism and environmentalism (1). Ecocritical themes in Ainu folk literature include respecting nature and appreciating what is given by the Earth. Ainu culture is viewed through its epics, myths, and folklore, and a range of ecocritical themes that mirror contemporary Ainu life are brought up. This paper concludes that Ainu fantasy texts for Japanese children convey ecocritical values and support cultural ecoliteracy. The development of cultural ecoliteracy leads to a critique of the anti-ecological effects of ruling-class culture, which requires that humanity be defined by its superiority over lesser humans, animals, nature, and all that is “other” (Gaard 326). The significant lack of Ainu presences in historical and contemporary stories reinforce the Ainu people’s long standing status as one of the most marginalized and stereotyped groups in the literature.

Allegory and animals in Olive Schreiner’s Undine: A Queer Little Child (1929)

Written and abandoned in the 1870s, and published posthumously in 1929, Undine: A Queer Little Child has remained on the margins of Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) studies, repeatedly dismissed as a juvenile and poor antecedent to The Story of An African Farm (1883), or deemed valuable primarily for its autobiographical content. This article redresses these schematic readings by analysing how Schreiner draws on allegorical forms in order to explore aspects of her burgeoning radicalism. Focusing on one of the main allegorical thrusts of the novel, provided by the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic animal characters that descend from mythical, fairy-tale and Ancient Greek philosophical origins, it investigates how the protagonist’s metaphorically significant associations with animals relate to freethinking, feminist and anti-imperialist ideas introduced by the novel. Undine thus undermines dominant 19th-century models of the “primitive” human or animal as less evolutionarily developed and without a political platform, which can be seen to be a liberating move when the novel is read in dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s lectures on animals, and with other recent work in postcolonial ecocriticism.

Ecocriticism on the edge: the Anthropocene as a threshold concept

Acknowledgments Preface Chapter One: The Anthropocene -- Questions of Definition Chapter Two: Imaging and Imagining the Whole Earth: The Terrestrial as Norm Chapter Three: Emergent Unreadability: Rereading a Lyric by Gary Snyder Chapter Four: Scale Framing Chapter Five: Scale Framing: A Reading Chapter Six: Postcolonial Ecocriticism and Dehumanizing Reading: An Australian Test-Case Chapter Seven: Anthropocene Disorder Chapter Eight: Denial: A Reading Chapter Nine: The Tragedy that Climate Change is not 'Interesting' Conclusion