Articulating a World of Difference: Ecocriticism, Postcolonialism and Globalization

Susie O’Brien

POSTCOLONIALISM ECOCRITICISM
 Envisions the world through urban eyes  Focuses on non-urban settings
 City= the “decolonized” world  Has an explicitly global focus
 Studies the world through a projection of  Concerned with the text’s planetary
otherness (Bhabha) consciousness
 Has strong materialist impulse  Focuses on realist texts
 Avoids realist texts  Stresses the “platial basis of human experience”
 Privileges “cosmopolitan restlessness” (Gandhi) (Buell, Letter)

 Postcolonialism criticism looks at the political and economic structures that shape and are shaped by
culture. Ecocriticism, on the other hand, focuses on the interface between culture and the physical
environment.
 Globalization, a process characterized in part by the intensification of connections between and within
different reals of global activity, played a crucial role in bridging ideological gaps between postcolonialism
and ecocriticism.
 Postcolonialism aims “to discover a balance between the preservation of identity and the embrace of
difference, between remembering the past and dwelling in the present”.
 Ecocriticism posits that survival depends on an accommodation not just of human difference, but of the
otherness of the physical environment.
 The idea that culture, in general, and narrative, in particular, might play a significant role in shaping the
material practices that lead to social and/or environmental decay, on the other hand, or renewal, on the
other, is shared by many postcolonial and ecocritical theorists.
 Illustrating nicely the inseparability of postcolonial and ecocritical concerns, John Tomlinson suggests that
to be a “citizen of the world”, one must be:

open to the diversity of global cultures and to be disposed to understand the cultural perspective of the other. But [one]
also—perhaps more importantly—need[s] to have a sense of wider cultural commitment—of belonging to the world as a
whole: that is… of a world in which, particularly in terms of common environmental threats requiring lifestyle adaptation,
there are no others.

 O’Brien is wary that in the attempt to merge the concerns of ecocriticism and postcolonialism in a new
“world” literary theory, the ethical commitment of both to the articulation of complexity—of expression, of
culture, of communication, of life—will be sacrificed to the compulsion towards economic and/or aesthetic
resolution and conquest.

Thought to Ponder:

 How does globalization and its preference for interdisciplinarity affect our understanding of literary text
and literary criticism—in particular, our understanding of the text’s “worldliness”?

Mapping Common Ground: Ecocriticism, Environmental History, and the Environmental Humanities
Hannes Berghtaller, et. al.

 Ecological crisis is not only a crisis of the physical environment but also a crisis of the cultural and social environment
—of the systems of representation and of the institutional structures through which contemporary society understands
and responds to environmental change.
  The different disciplines and traditions need to begin to explain themselves to each other, so that they can map common
ground, such that it needs to keep disciplinary specificities in sight, even as it aims to articulate a broader vision and
move beyond merely interdisciplinary concerns.
 What the environmental humanities offer is not a traditionally “humanist” perspective on the ecological crisis; rather it
is a different mode of thought, one better suited for understanding the ambiguities of the subject.
 The environment is a social phenomenon. The concept of “the environment” is not exclusively material. Rather, it is a
product of social practices of environing—of the multiple processes through which human beings modify their
surroundings as they make their living from and in the natural world, and of the symbolic transformations which
configure “the environment” as a space for human action.

Environmental humanities should:

 Question the normative dimensions of current environmental practices and practices of environing
 Attend to the protocols and the public reception of the scientific discourse while bearing in mind that scientific data are not simply
social fabrications
 Constitute the human species as an imaginary community
 Advocate for a greater reflexivity and a deeper understanding of human beings and their varied relationships with the world in which
they have evolved and which they altered
 Reassess the history of their respective disciplines to identify connections and lines of convergence

 Environmental justice has acted, and continues to act, as a unifying principle for ecocriticism and environmental
history. As a concept, environment justice identifies overlapping territory where social, cultural, and environmental
challenges must be confronted all at once.
 Environmental justice also serves as a political nexus that bridges the gaps between ecocriticism and postcolonialism as
it highlights the political agency of writer-activists and communities erased from official memory and confronts social
inequalities on a planetary scale.
 New materialist and material feminist approaches to bodies, things, animality, and agency also opened new avenues for
interdisciplinary research. These approaches enrich the environmental justice framework by questioning the tendency
to gloss over the agency of matter in our everyday lives.
 Any attempt to combine environmental history and ecocriticism must deal with the central question of the place of the
text and the function of textual interpretations. What must matter to environmental humanities is how texts are
entangled with and address the larger processes by which societies conceptualize and manage their environment.
 In order to realize the promise of the environmental humanities is principally one of translation and transmission—
between the disciplines that constitute it, but also and perhaps more importantly, to a public whose existence we can no
longer take for granted, but that we must assemble.

Thought to Ponder:

 As students (and teachers) of humanities, how does the “convergence” of environmental history and ecocriticism
enrich our understanding of the text as a product of the environing process?