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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.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Contributors(p. vii)
• Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth(p. 3)
• Part I Cultivating Place
• 1 Cultivating Community: Counterlandscaping in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss(p. 43)
• 2 Haiti's Elusive Paradise(p. 62)
• 3 Toward a Caribbean Ecopoetics: Derek Walcott's Language of Plants(p. 80)
• Part II Forest Fictions
• 4 Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures(p. 99)
• 5 The Postcolonial Ecology of the New World Baroque: Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps(p. 117)
• 6 Forest Fictions and Ecological Crises: Reading the Politics of Survival in Mahasweta Devi's "Dhowli"(p. 136)
• Part III The Lives Of (Nonhuman) Animals
• 7 Stranger in the Eco-Village: Environmental Time, Race, and Ecologies of Looking(p. 159)
• 8 What the Whales Would Tell Us: Cetacean Communication in Novels by Witi Ihimaera, Linda Hogan, Zakes Mda, and Amitav Ghosh(p. 182)
• 9 Compassion, Commodification, and The Lives of Animals: J. M. Coetzee's Recent Fiction(p. 200)
• 10 "Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us": Toxic Postcoloniality in Animal's People(p. 216)
• Part IV Militourism
• 11 Heliotropes: Solar Ecologies and Pacific Radiations(p. 235)
• 12 Activating Voice, Body, and Place: Kanaka Maoli and Ma'ohi Writings for Kaho'olawe and Moruroa(p. 254)
• 13 "Out of This Great Tragedy Will Come a World Class Tourism Destination": Disaster, Ecology, and Post-Tsunami Tourism Development in Sri Lanka(p. 273)
• 14 In Place: Tourism, Cosmopolitan Bioregionalism, and Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness(p. 291)
• Works Cited(p. 309)
• Index(p. 337)

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CHOICE Review

In this eclectic collection DeLoughrey (UCLA) and Handley (BYU) unite ecocritical and postcolonial studies with oppression in a postcolonial world. The geographical stretch is vast and stunning--West Bengal, Qolora, Port-au-Prince, coastal Sri Lanka, the radioactive beaches of the Pacific, game lodges in South Africa--and the diversity of texts and images--Haitian paradise paintings, tropical plants, Caribbean deforestation, whale talk, militourism--scintillates. Connections among the colonized are plain: humans, animals, biosystems, and ecologies have been and continue to be subjected to abuse and crises of impotence and termination. Deriving by definition from locales having suffered centuries of subjection--subjection that is perpetuated by late-20th-century globalization, consumerism, and multicultural hybridization--the literature discussed includes Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (which looks at the hill country of Nepal), Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps (a south American river jungle), Mahasweta Devi's "Dhowli" (the bridge between a Brahman and an untouchable in Bangladesh). This volume makes clear the value of discourse, both textual and nonverbal, among witnesses of social and ecological injustice. The introduction serves as a manifesto for uniting the two fields of study. This is first collection of its kind, and its serves as an invitation for further interdisciplinary exploration. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. L. L. Johnson Lewis & Clark College

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Elizabeth DeLoughrey is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacijic Island Literatures and a coeditor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture.
George B. Handley, Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University, is the author of Postslavery Literatures in the Americas and New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Wintman, Neruda, and Walcott.