Postcolonial Ecologies Research Articles

Space, Dominance, and Resistance: The Postcolonial Ecology in Isidore Okpewho’s Tides

Space, Dominance, and Resistance: The Postcolonial Ecology in Isidore Okpewho’s Tides

Postcolonial Ecologies and Postcolonial Ecofeminism in the Poetry of Mohja Kahf

Postcolonial Ecologies and Postcolonial Ecofeminism in the Poetry of Mohja Kahf

Introduction to the Special Issue

Seeking critical and sound examination, analysis, and evaluation of complex ideas and theories of established past directions in the interdisciplinary fields of diaspora, postcolonial, and culture studies, this collection aims to chart intellectually meaningful pathways for future planetary survival and thriving, while throwing needed light on intricacies and nuances of established research and existing systems. Pondering the problems but also pursuing the possibilities of “diaspora connections” is a necessary and urgent endeavor today. While academics, activists, and cultural practitioners are creating numerous portals out of the human-conflict epidemic, and some see in the metaphoric and real “disease” the very artifacts and materials for hope of transformative power, the collection is driven by the realization, articulation, and intention of seeking inclusive paradigms and building enduring diaspora connections. In this spirit, I invited research papers that address, illuminate, analyze, and/or critique specific manifestations, dynamisms, or stagnancies of “diaspora connections,” as well as explore its multiple understandings and contexts. Whether focusing on recognized or emerging contours of diaspora communities shaped by and beyond concepts of race, ethnicity, colonization, and developmental logics, researched works on alignments and disjunctions, as well as new formations along postcolonial ecologies and narratives of culture, social formations and experiences were encouraged.

Postcolonial Ecology & The Cunning of Modernity: Iyat Ekhon Aranya Asil as a Critiqu

Postcolonial Ecology & The Cunning of Modernity: Iyat Ekhon Aranya Asil as a Critiqu

Postcolonial ecologies in cyberspace: on the “anti-environments” of Singapore Art Week 2022s’ Somewhere in Bedok and Peripheral Spaces

ABSTRACT This article explores how digital art exhibitions and bioecology interact in the contemporary Singaporean cultural milieu. Applying theoretical tools from recent work in environmental and oceanic media studies, I argue that mediations of digital art exhibitions in the postcolony reveal postcolonial approaches to bioecology. Digital art exhibitions can provide a frame to understand humans and bioecology as relationally – that is to say, ecologically – embedded with each other, confusing boundaries between the material and immaterial, universal and particular.

A Mighty Cooperative

A Mighty Cooperative

Review essay on African Ecomedia and Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature

Cajetan Iheka’s African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (2021) and his edited collection, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media (2022), importantly privilege—indeed celebrate—non-Western epistemologies at the very forefront of ecocriticism. In the former book, Africa is not “lagging” behind but is modeling sustainability for the future. This is a resourceful continent even in the face of “nonrenewable infrastructures dotting the continent’s environment” (11). Iheka offers a meticulous historical contextualization of Africa’s present economic demise while beautifully answering the question, “Why can’t we be seen?” (African Ecomedia 105). Kisilu Musya, a famer in Julia Dahr’s climate change film Thank You For the Rain (2017), makes this query, which cannot be ignored in a book rich in both its theoretical frameworks and interventions in fields such as African and media studies as well as the energy and environmental humanities. Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media advances Iheka’s agenda to make the invisible visible. Ultimately, the various ecomedia employed in Iheka’s works suggest an Anthropocene implicated in global degradation. As users of smartphones and paper, we are the problem as well as the solution to more ethical, postcolonial ecologies.

Idwi, Xenopus laevis, and African clawed frog: teaching counternarratives of invasive species in postcolonial ecology

This article presents a Pedagogical Framework for Invasive Species to shift how we understand, teach, and study invasive species, especially when people are responsible for their expansion into new ecosystems. The focus is on a species originating from countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that humans extracted and introduced in certain regions of the Americas, Europe, and Asia: Xenopus laevis, African Clawed Frog, or Idwi in the Zulu language. This article re-introduces the frog Idwi through lenses of de/post-colonial theory, Indigenous studies, and Critical Race Theory to create counternarratives. Through a popular press analysis, the article uncovers how humans in colonial contexts extracted species from de/colonizing spaces to export to other regions of the world. When the frogs were profitable, the entrepreneurs who exported them were valorized. However, once seen as invasive, frogs were targeted with xenophobic projections. This article foregrounds counternarratives that challenge and critique universal application of the “invasive species” label.

‘Sea-salt rides its currents to the city’: Lagos and the poetics of flooding

ABSTRACT Lagos is perhaps the most economically, socially and culturally crucial coastal city in Nigeria. The pressures of expansion and overpopulation have resulted in many ecological crises, one of which is flooding. Nigerian poets have poetised incidents of flooding in Lagos. These poems are concerned with the biophysical space of Lagos as a city as well as the species lives, including human lives, that get flooded away in the annual ritual of rising water. In this article, I read a selection of these poems in a theoretical context drawn from insights in postcolonial ecocriticism and urban political ecology. While my analysis will concentrate on the ecopolitical force of the poems, I will also examine the aestheticization of flooding and the use of the flood as a poetic trope – a metaphor that disables humans’ sense of complacency in human-centred urban systems and enables our sense of openness to recognize the being of waters. I conclude by pointing out that in postcolonial societies, the representation of urban ecological problems in literature is one way of indicting humans for the ecological fate both humans and non-humans now face.

Intertwined Destinies: Colonization of Indigenious Peoples and Environment in V. S. Naipaul’s in a Free State

Postcolonial ecologies direct our attention to the specially environmental dimensions of literary works by focusing on the often overlooked nonhuman elements, ecological disasters and the inequitable distribution of resources and waste in developing nations. Decolonization has not solved the problems of poverty, corruption, pollution, disorder, and other vices that characterized colonial countries and has brought about little or no significant difference to the predicament of the environment and the masses in postcolonial countries. This situation is vividly demonstrated in Trinidadian-British writer V. S. Naipual’s In a Free State in which environmental problems as well as social issues continue to directly bear on the destiny of indigenous peoples. In this respect, this study discusses how the fate of the environment and indigenous peoples are intertwined, particularly in postcolonial societies with reference to the work of V.S. Naipaul’s novel. The paper engages with the subject of postcolonial ecologies in discussing the relationship between indigenous peoples and the forms of colonization and its impacts that Naipaul describes in the novel. The paper establishes the centrality of indigenous peoples to the modern colonial context while underscoring the continuity of its resulting environmental degradation in the postcolonial context.

‘Collecting What the Sea Gives Back’: Postcolonial Ecologies of the Ocean in Contemporary Chilean Film

This article proposes a new mode of understanding the entanglement of ecological and postcolonial questions in contemporary Chilean filmmaking, through the lens of directorial subjectivity. Both Tierra sola (Solitary Land, Tiziana Panizza, 2017), and El botón de nácar (The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzmán, 2015) contest hegemonic structures of belonging by constructing an alternative ‘oceanic archive’. Yet where Guzmán's metaphorical meditations on indigenous connections to the ocean risk collapsing into romanticism and replicating colonial visuality, Panizza's reflexive conception of filmmaking as a situated and embodied practice facilitates a subtler understanding of cinema's political engagement in this sphere.

Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past

Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past

Precarity and Resistance in Oceanic Literature

This essay examines the writings of Sudesh Mishra and Epeli Hau'ofa to establish how precarity is embedded in Fiji’s colonial past and the contemporary internal and well as global geopolitics. Beginning by recounting Fiji’s colonial capitalist and territorial history and the segregationist policies of the imperial powers, this essay discusses the impact of nuclear testing on the post-colonial ecology of the Pacific Islands. Cultural and ecological precarity in the island state of Fiji includes colonial capitalism, militarization, and unstable political arrangements of the last two hundred years. An alternative framework that reimagines the oceanic identity, providing sustainable, inclusive solutions for the future, is required urgently. The writings of Mishra and Hau'ofa offer the possibilities of engaging with the history, geography and culture of the islands to create sustainable care communities engaged in preserving the already delicate ecology of the islands.

To Dwell and To Reinhabit: Kiana Davenports’s House of Many Gods as Bioregional Literature

Environmental degradation has become a pivotal issue in Hawai’i nowadays. The policies of United States’government and military has shaped the Hawai’ian ecology. Through the process of ecological imperialism,started from the beginning of American colonialism, both the Hawai’ian’s landscape and their connection withthe environment is disrupted. Modern Hawai’ian ecology nowadays is a postcolonial ecology, which was, andstill is molded by the American imperial power. As a product of colonialism, Hawai’ians’ have becomealienated with their ancestral traditions, especially regarding interrelation between human and non-human.Taking cues from Lawrence Buell’s assertion that environmental crisis is a crisis of the imagination, modernHawai’ian literature tries to reorient human–non human relationship from indigenous Hawai’ianepistemology. As seen in Kiana Davenport’s the House of Many Gods, traditional Hawai’ian perspective isreimagined to reterritorialize Hawai’ians in their previous environmental outlook, before the arrival of theAmericans. This study argues that by several bioregional concepts such as dwelling, and reinhabit, KianaDavenport’s the House of Many Gods can be stated as a bioregional literature.

Settler Postcolonial Ecologies and Native Species Regeneration on Banks Peninsula, Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACTThe 2050 Ecological Vision for Banks Peninsula, New Zealand is ‘to create an environment in which the community values, protects and cares for the biodiversity, landscape and special character of Banks Peninsula’. Its aspirational goals point to the peninsula conservation trust’s vision for success on the moral horizons of land and place. These horizons stretch visually from the volcanic crater ridgelines to the outer coastal bays and the sea beyond. Temporally they span 175 years of cultural encounters of peoples and biota, and reveal community-based strategies designed to support thriving biodiversity on land that has been used primarily for production. This article draws on the event, textual and interview data as well as fieldwork conducted in 2015 during the 175th anniversary of organised European settlement. Settler pasts and presents are negotiated in natural heritage preservation through the restoration of native flora and fauna in natural areas and protected connectivity corridors. A settler postcolonial ecology for these hill country lands is committed to the simultaneous conservation of biological and cultural diversity in which indigenous flora and fauna, landscapes and people, are irreversibly hybridised, and endemic species become constitutive of a postcolonial national identity in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Strategic Science vs. Tactical Storytelling: Disrupting Radioactive Masculinity through Postcolonial Ecologies

In both USA and India, nuclear bomb tests were first carried out and continue to be implemented in marginalized sites—Native American reservations and Bishnoi territory in India—inhabited by non-normative subjectivities. Nuclear proliferation emerging from such soft spaces (Williams) is always concomitant with performances of what I term as radioactive masculinity: a very specific form of militarized masculinity emerging from the contingent association between privileged and gendered bodies, and the nuclear bomb. By juxtaposing Native American perspectives on the bomb, represented by Leslie Silko's Ceremony, with socio-legal artifacts from the Bishnoi community in Rajasthan (India) I argue that tactical storytelling creates postcolonial ecologies, which recovers minoritarian perspectives about nuclearization and disrupts the strategic ideologies of Anglo-American modernity. I further emphasize that by not trying to represent the Other, both the Bishnoi texts and Ceremony belong to the domain of planetarity (Spivak) and question the globalizing narrative of disciplines like Postcolonialism and Ecocriticism.

Postcolonial Ecologies of Parasite and Host: Making Parasitism Cosmopolitan.

The interest of F. Macfarlane Burnet in host-parasite interactions grew through the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in his book, Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease (1940), often regarded as the founding text of disease ecology. Our knowledge of the influences on Burnet's ecological thinking is still incomplete. Burnet later attributed much of his conceptual development to his reading of British theoretical biology, especially the work of Julian Huxley and Charles Elton, and regretted he did not study Theobald Smith's Parasitism and Disease (1934) until after he had formulated his ideas. Scholars also have adduced Burnet's fascination with natural history and the clinical and public health demands on his research effort, among other influences. I want to consider here additional contributions to Burnet's ecological thinking, focusing on his intellectual milieu, placing his research in a settler society with exceptional expertise in environmental studies and pest management. In part, an ''ecological turn'' in Australian science in the 1930s, derived to a degree from British colonial scientific investments, shaped Burnet's conceptual development. This raises the question of whether we might characterize, in postcolonial fashion, disease ecology, and other studies of parasitism, as successful settler colonial or dominion science.

Ecology and empire in Andrew Burnaby's Travels through the Middle Settlements of North America (1775)

This essay draws attention to Andrew Burnaby's Travels through the Middle Settlements of North America (1775) for its imperially motivated yet also often ecocritically inclined documentation of colonial ecologies. No existing interpretations of the text have explicitly studied the traveller's imperial impulses in relation to his ecological consciousness. Readers have primarily focused on Travels as a colonial-era document of human-centred life. I argue that Burnaby's travelogue deserves to be recognised for its nuanced documentation of the non-human realm in relation to anthropocentrism. The author's self-positioning magnifies the notion that the formation of imperial identity can accommodate fragments of ecologically interested selfhood. The narrative stages the interconnectivity between political and ecological arguments, dramatising what critics have theorised as the “inextricability of environmental history and empire building” [DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George B. Handley. 2011. “Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth.” In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, and George B. Handley, 3–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 10]. Burnaby's thoughts alternate between ecocentric and anthropocentric perspectives, yielding a fertile interpretive ground for both postcolonial and ecocritical inquiry.

Locating an Indigenous ethos in ecological performance

Abstract Stories are powerful forms of representation and cultural imagery in many Indigenous cultures, and performance is a site where these stories are shared, revealed and enacted, making it a powerful site of cultural imagery for Indigenous ecological knowledges and cosmologies. I argue that an Indigenous ecological ethos is a necessary addition to thinking about performance and ecology, one that resists patronizing and simplistic stereotypes of the ‘eco-Indian’ and acknowledges diverse, complex and evolving epistemologies. Drawing on Huggan and Tiffin’s postcolonialism ecocriticism, as well as May and Kuppers experience as non-Indigenous scholars and practitioners, this article considers the role postcolonial ecology might play in the field of performance and ecology and how non-indigenous scholars and theatremakers might engage with it. I suggest strategies for locating an Indigenous ecological ethos, through Däwes, Nolan, Howe and Halba and their critical reflections on Indigenous performances specifically attuned to ecological concerns. I draw on plays and performances that highlight the inseparability of land, identity and morethan- human (Salmon is Everything, NK603: Action for Performer & e-Maiz, Woman for Walking); work that is non-linear and recognizes the simultaneity of past, present and future (Burning Vision, Chasing Honey); and work that takes up ecological justice issues (Sila). These aspects suggest ways of locating an Indigenous ecological ethos and developing a more multivocal and inclusive field of performance and ecology.

The Post-Colonial Ecology of Siberian Shamanic Revivalism

The Sakha national revival in Sakha (Yakutia), Siberia, aims to recover dying elements of Sakha culture, in order to preserve the Sakha people’s distinctive identity. And yet this revival is itself imbued with assumptions rooted in the European cultures that initiated modernist colonisation. Contemporary Sakha shamanism reflects the tensions within the nationalist revival, in the contrasting tendencies for activists, firstly, to recover what is seen as the old, genuine shamanic practice—and, secondly, to assimilate foreign spiritual techniques. But when these two strands of endeavour are examined with reference to the perceptions of person and environment that formed the basis of pre-Soviet Sakha life, it becomes apparent that they complement each other. Both facilitate the intersection of contrasting knots of relationship, predicated on differing ontologies. Sakha people currently live and work within institutions that have their roots in European modernism. However, older Sakha relationships with a live natural environment have not entirely disappeared. The authors suggest that the persistent presence of an environment imbued with spiritual agency differentiates the Sakha shamanic revival from the European traditions that shape its central motivations. This case reveals the importance of attending to place and environment, in the discussion of post-colonialist identity politics.