Postcolonial Ecologies Literatures of the Environment

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.

1. - Cultivating Community:Counterlandscaping in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss
2. - Haiti's Elusive Paradise
3. - Towards a Caribbean Ecopoetics: Derek Walcott's Language of Plants
4. - Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures
5. - The Postcolonial Ecology of the New World Baroque:
6. - Forest Fictions and Ecological Crises:
7. - Stranger in the Eco-Village: Environmental Time, Race, and Ecologies of Looking
8. - What the Whales Would Tell Us: Cetacean Communication in Novels by Witi Ihimaera,Linda Hogan, Zakes Mda, and Amitav Ghosh
9. - Compassion, Commodification, and The Lives of Animals: J.M. Coetzee's Recent Fiction
11. - Heliotropes: Solar Ecologies and Pacific Radiations
12. - Activating Voice, Body, and Place:
13. - "Out of this great tragedy will come a world class tourism destination:"
14. - . In Place: Tourism, Cosmopolitan Bioregionalism, and Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness

Elizabeth DeLoughrey is an Associate Professor in the English Department at UCLA. With George Handley and Renée Gosson, she is the co-editor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (U Virginia 2005) and with Cara Cilano, she has edited a special issue of the journal Isle on postcolonial ecocriticism (2007). She has published articles about postcolonial literature in journals such as Ariel, Interventions, Modern Fiction Studies, and PMLA. She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (U Hawai`i 2007) and currently completing a manuscript about globalization, nature, and the tropics. George B. Handley, Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University, is the author of Postslavery Literatures of the Americas (Virginia 2000) and New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott (Georgia 2007).