Postcolonial Ecologies Literatures of the Environment

About this book

This is the first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial studies. By examining African, Caribbean, Pacific Island and South Asian literatures and how they depict the relationship between humans and nature, this book makes a compelling argument for a more global approach to thinking through our current environmental crisis. Turning to the contemporary production of postcolonial novelists and poets, this collection poses the literary imagination as a crucial to imagining what Eduoard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth." The collection is organized around thematic concerns such as the relationship between culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, the lives of animals, and the relationship between the military and the tourist industry. The scholars collected here are at the forefront of the emergent field of postcolonial ecocriticism and this book will make a remarkable contribution to rethinking the environment and its representation in the humanities.

Contents

INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF THE EARTH; ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY & GEORGE HANDLEY; I.CULTIVATING PLACE; 1. Cultivating Community:Counterlandscaping in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss; JILL DIDUR; 2. Haiti's Elusive Paradise; LEGRACE BENSON; 3. Towards a Caribbean Ecopoetics: Derek Walcott's Language of Plants; ELAINE SAVORY; II. FOREST FICTIONS; 4. Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures; LIZABETH PARAVISINI GEBERT; 5. The Postcolonial Ecology of the New World Baroque; ALEJO CARPENTIER'S THE LOST STEPS; GEORGE B. HANDLEY; 6. Forest Fictions and Ecological Crises; READING THE POLITICS OF SURVIVAL IN MAHASWETA DEVI'S "DHOWLI"; JENNIFER WENZEL; III. THE LIVES OF (NONHUMAN) ANIMALS; 7. Stranger in the Eco-Village: Environmental Time, Race, and Ecologies of Looking; ROB NIXON; 8. What the Whales Would Tell Us: Cetacean Communication in Novels by Witi Ihimaera,Linda Hogan, Zakes Mda, and Amitav Ghosh; JONATHAN STEINWAND; 9. Compassion, Commodification, and The Lives of Animals: J.M. Coetzee's Recent Fiction; ALLISON CARRUTH; IV. MILITOURISM; 11. Heliotropes: Solar Ecologies and Pacific Radiations; ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY; 12. Activating Voice, Body, and Place; KANAKA MAOLI AND MA'OHI WRITINGS FOR KAHO'OLAWE AND MORUROA; DINA EL DESSOUKY; 13. "Out of this great tragedy will come a world class tourism destination:"; DISASTER, ECOLOGY, AND POST-TSUNAMI TOURISM DEVELOPMENT IN SRI LANKA; ANTHONY CARRIGAN; 14. . In Place: Tourism, Cosmopolitan Bioregionalism, and Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness; BYRON CAMINERO-SANTANGELO

Customer Reviews