Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities ─ Postcolonial Approaches

This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental Humanities, focusing in particular on how the history of globalization and imperialism represents a special challenge to approaches to environmental issues. Essays in this path-breaking collection examine the role narrative can play in drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about long-term environmental problems such as climate change, militarism, deforestation, toxicity, and agricultural resource management. The volume explores implications for defining a postcolonial approach to the environmental humanities, especially in conjunction with current thinking in areas such as political ecology and environmental justice. Spanning regions such as Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, essays by founding figures in the field as well as new scholars expand the geographical and historical contours of ecocriticism by examining how writers have imagined the environment, providing vital new perspectives on how ecological change can be traced to globalization and a history of colonialism. It moves beyond literary studies to a more interdisciplinary discussion of the importance of narrative to our understanding of environmental concerns. At the heart of this is a conviction that a thoroughly global, postcolonial, and comparative approach is essential to defining the emergent field of the environmental humanities, and that this field has much to offer in understanding critical issues surrounding the creation of alternative ecological futures.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey is an Associate Professor in English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is co-editor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment (2005), and Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (2011). She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (2007) and completing a book about climate change, empire, and the literary and visual arts.

Jill Didur is an Associate Professor in English at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory (2006), co-editor of special issues of Cultural Critique on Critical Posthumanism (2003) and Cultural Studies on Revisiting the Subaltern in the New Empire (2003), and completing a book about imperialism, gardening, and the environment in postcolonial literature.

Anthony Carrigan is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment (Routledge, 2011), and is a Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat.