Animesh Roy INTRODUCTION

Ibadan Journal of Humanistic Studies, 2020

Scholarship within literary discourse, at present, transcends the independent status for which a particular analytic paradigm is known. The irresolvable plurality of “identity” within the realm of literary criticism makes the merger of several literary theories much more seamless than in antique, medieval and renaissance periods. This merger of literary theories, however, raises more issues than answers. Therefore, this paper explores the contradictions in postcolonial-ecocriticism. It critically analyses some of the contending issues that the fusion of these two distinct fields has raised in the selected essays of Rob Nixon, Elizabeth DeLoughery, Griffin Huggan and Helen Triffin. The idea of place is the connecting rod between Postcolonialism and Ecocriticism since postcolonialism focuses on the re-imagining of the history of a colonised place while ecocriticism critically theorises for a return to or a conservation of a pristine place. One the one hand, both theories are distinct in their methodology and on the other, both seem to thrive on upturning binaries: for postcolonialism, the West/Other binary, and for ecocriticism, the Human/Nature binary. Also, postcolonialism favours discourses from and of former colonies while ecocriticism venerates the American and British models of nature. This paper therefore concludes that an understanding of a former colonised people and their attachment to place can be understood when binaries are dissolved. In critical discourse, there should be a free play and not an upturning of the West/ Other, Human/Nature dichotomies.

Oxford University Press, 2011

The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representing what Eduoard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth." The essays are organized around a group of thematic concerns that engage culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, the lives of animals, and the relationship between the military and the tourist industry. With chapters that address works by J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Zakes Mda, and many others, Postcolonial Ecologies makes a remarkable contribution to rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing global environmental issues.

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2012

Editors DeLoughrey and Handley have a strong background in different aspects of western hemispheric colonial and postcolonial literatures and have clearly relied on that experience to build an edited collection that not only provides a range of literary and cultural studies analyses of the postcolonial and the ecocritical, but also a volume that reads as a coherent body of work-not just disparate essays. As a result, a reader gains a sense of cumulative knowledge as he or she moves from the first essay to the next. Unlike many edited collections, where a reader might want to just dip in and read a chapter or two, skipping around and ignoring the

The Trumpeter, 2016

In this paper I will argue in favour of an intersection of interests between postcolonial and environmental studies, a convergence built on the relevance of hegemony in fully understanding the notion of place espoused by environmentalists. The catalyst for the exploration of that possible collaboration will be Rob Nixon’s discussion of the issue in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011).

Canadian Literature, 2001

Anita Rau Badami's "The Hero's Walk" is discussed. The novel engages explicitly with the world, and with the text-in-the-world, in the context of globalization.

It is in recognition that both postcolonialism and Ecocriticism were born of a desire to question abusive systems of domination and seek solutions to these abuses that the category postcolonial Ecocriticism came to be established. This convergence of both fields seeks to elicit methods of theorization and conceptualization of the abuse of both nature and culture. It therefore inserts a postcolonial ethics into Ecocriticism while concomitantly engaging ecocritical praxis in postcolonialism. Given the persisting legacies of colonialism several decades after its formal end, and the continuing degradation of the ecosystem largely consequent upon human activities, this paper seeks to formulate an ethics of postcolonial ecopedagogy. Since people more readily respond to what they have experienced, it becomes easier to raise ecological consciousness through postcolonial thinking. This paper is interested in formulating and eventually experimenting postcolonial ecopedagogical ethics. It seeks to provide answers to such questions as: can a link be forged between colonial domination and the domination of nature? How can the postcolonial perspective be adopted in teaching environmental sustainability? How can these be conceptualized and a postcolonial ecopedagogy formulated to address the nature/culture problematic? Answers to these questions will be attempted through an engagement of postcolonial theory and Ecocriticism.

Caribbean Studies, 2013

F or any individual living in the 21st century, ecology-the physical environment and the state of natural resources-is an ever present concern. Within the academic arena many cite the American University as the responsive leader on how people think and engage with ecology via literature. This misleading idea is precisely what Elizabeth

Localities, 2017