Post colonial Eco criticism

 

 

Hello friends,

 

Environmental criticism, also known as ecocriticism and “green” criticism, is a rapidly emerging field of literary study that considers the relationship that human beings have to the environment.

 

As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in the Introduction to The Eco criticism Reader,

 

 “Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature form a gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts”

 

Environmental critics explore how nature and the natural world are imagined through literary texts. As with changing perceptions of gender, such literary representations are not only generated by particular cultures, they play a significant role in generating those cultures. Thus, if we wish to understand our contemporary attitude toward the environment, its literary history is an excellent place to start. While authors such as Thoreau and Wordsworth may first come to mind in this context, literary responses to environmental concerns are as old as the issues themselves.

 

Department of English, Maharajakrishnkumarsinhji Bhavnagar University had organized Guest lecture on 'Post Colonial Eco Criticism' with Devang Nanavati. Click here to view entire session.

 

Deforestation, air pollution, endangered species, wetland loss, animal rights, and rampant consumerism have all been appearing as controversial issues in Western literature for hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of years.

During last semester, I prepared a blog task on Eco-feminism is embedded here. In this blog, I studied one Hindi poem with eco critical theory.

 Click here to read eco critical interpretation of the poem हर हर गंगे

In this blog, I have tried to step ahead than just eco critical point of view.  This blog will help to study Eco criticism with post colonial view.

  

How does an understanding of the earth and the ways in which processes of domination and control have been mapped onto it throughout human history affect the way in which we understand foreign policy?

 

It consciously understands “spaces” as broadly as possible, taking into account both the physical and metaphysical spaces with which humans interact. In a practical sense, this postcolonial Eco criticism is not so much about the beauty of flowers or trees as it is about mineral mines, oil fields, river deltas and urban areas whose ownership and meaning are still wildly contested. For many writers from the developing world, writing about their lived environments is a way to “position themselves in natural settings in order to rein habit a landscape or place that is intrinsic to their philosophies of being in the world,” to give irrefutable meaning to places of deep significance.

 

But writing is not the only way in which persons can affirm their attachment to contested spaces: political organization, armed groups and civil society activism can perform a similar function in staking a claim to a place. To approach the top-down process of international relations policymaking from a perspective informed by grassroots postcolonial Eco criticism forces one to think about how ownership and identification with land and space plays a role in individuals’ and groups’ actions in a globalized world.

 

In the face of governments that are unable to maintain control of their territories, violent non-state groups claim ownership of spaces through highly public acts of gruesome violence as well as pragmatic acts of resistance.

 

If postcolonial Eco criticism can help us understand events from a different perspective, how can we create policy to reflect that understanding?

 

To understand events through the lens of postcolonial Eco criticism is to ask oneself the question:

What is the meaning of the space upon which the events are occurring? 

 

If postcolonial Eco criticism can help us understand events from a different perspective, how can we create policy to reflect that understanding? More simply put what would a postcolonial Eco critical foreign policy look like? At its heart, a postcolonial Eco critical foreign policy would be attentive not only to the ways in which land and space shape human society, but also to the ways in which colonialism and its 21st-century successors shape land and space.

 

The world is not a board game: you cannot simply wipe the board clean and start over. As environmentalists have argued for decades, there are certain changes to the natural world that are simply irreversible. Glaciers melt, the ozone layer depletes, species go extinct and desertification takes its toll. This is clearest in the areas of energy and other extractive industries, where an immediate economic interest is weighed against the eventual environmental impact, with the former often winning. While the environmental effects of a policy are important to consider, there is also often a deeper human impact beyond the geographic changes. Whether land is privatized and sold or nationalized, the processes of industrialization and resource extraction serve to make spaces off-limits to people who may feel a deep connection to it. 

 

While postcolonial ecocriticism may have descriptive and prescriptive utility in international affairs, it is only as useful as much as it is actually used. 

 

‘The world has become a more turbulent place, where anyone with a new idea can put it into action before you can say “startup” and launch widespread movements with a single Tweet. This has left organizational leaders with a real problem, since the trusted, traditional approach to strategic planning is based on assumptions that no longer hold. The static strategic plan is dead.’

 

Is arguing for a postcolonial Eco critical approach to international relations really just another way of saying “pay attention to space?”

 

Perhaps, but the value of postcolonial Eco criticism can resonate on a deeper level, as well. It is an exercise in thinking about international affairs from a new perspective, in connecting the abstract realm of literary criticism to burning issues on the global stage, in drawing lines between ideas and events that do not necessarily come instinctively or naturally but that reveal new layers of meaning. 

 

Thank you.

 

 

 

 

 

References:

 

 

 

Afzal , Alia. “Ecocritical Post-Colonial Studies on Humans, Land, and Animals .” scholarworks.uni.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1406&context=etd#:~:text=Ecocritical%20post%2Dcolonial%20study%20is,between%20literature%20and%20the%20environment.

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: an Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester University Press, 2017.

 Bertens, Johannes Willem. Literary Theory: the Basics. Taylor & Francis, 2010.

Buell, Lawrence. Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences. 6 May 2011, www.deepdyve.com/lp/university-of-nebraska-press/ecocriticism-some-emerging-trends-Ha5hUJWHx2.

Loomba, Ania. Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Duke University Press, 2005.