Postcolonial Ecologies

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 collectionposes 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 relationshipbetween 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.

a vital contribution to postcolonial ecocriticism.

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 asAriel, 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).