Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment - Paperback

by Elizabeth Deloughrey (Editor), George Handley (Editor)

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.

Author Biography

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 Pacific 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 of the Americas and New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott.