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Postcolonial Ecocriticism
Literature, Animals, Environment
E-Book: 252 pages
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In Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examine relationships between humans, animals and the environment in postcolonial texts. Divided into two sections that consider the postcolonial first from an environmental and then a zoocritical perspective, the book looks at:
- narratives of development in postcolonial writing
- entitlement and belonging in the pastoral genre
- colonialist ‘asset stripping’ and the Christian mission
- the politics of eating and representations of cannibalism
- animality and spirituality
- sentimentality and anthropomorphism
- the place of the human and the animal in a ‘posthuman’ world.
Making use of the work of authors as diverse as J.M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Jamaica Kincaid and V.S. Naipaul, the authors argue that human liberation will never be fully achieved without challenging how human societies have constructed themselves in hierarchical relation to other human and nonhuman communities, and without imagining new ways in which these ecologically connected groupings can be creatively transformed.
Review
“This volume will be required reading for anyone interested in the debate about the literary in the era of environmental apocalypse.”
– American Book Review
“This book–the critical meeting of the methods of ecocriticism and postcolonialism–is long overdue. Essential.”
– CHOICE
“By grounding issues of representation in issues of environmental activism, Huggan and Tiffin remind ecocritics of the importance of this type of work. In this sense, their book makes an important contribution to ecocriticism in its steps to internationalise the field while also creating space for literary analysis within environmental activism around the world.”
– Green Letters
“Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment offers a rich and timely discussion of the ecocritical turn within postcolonial literary studies. This volume is an introduction to the field and is thus especially valuable to readers invested in postcolonial studies but new to ecocriticism…This volume further distinguishes itself by bringing together ecocriticism and the much newer zoocriticism”
-Aarthi Vadde, Duke University, Contemporary Literature
“… there is much to admire in the book’s breadth and usefulness, including pithy and accessible introductions to the politics of postcolonial development, racism’s links with speciesism, and the role of post-humanism in a putatively “post-natural” world.”
– Anthony Carrigan, Keele University, Journal of Postcolonial Writing
“Postcolonial Ecocriticism offers a comprehensive summary and intelligent analysis of concerns and debates that define the terrain between and within the fields it surveys…Postcolonial Ecocriticism covers an impressive range of texts, including mainly fiction, but also poetry and drama, from India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Caribbean, and the postcolonial diaspora…The effect is consistently engaging and insightful.”
–Susie O’Brien, McMaster University, Postcolonial Text
“This thorough and well-written introduction to the field of postcolonial ecocriticism…offers a useful foundation by meticulously mapping the territory.”
–Roman Bartosch, Universities of Cologne/Duisburg-Essen, Ecozon
About the Author
Helen Tiffin was formerly Canada Research Chair in English and Post-Colonial Studies at Queen’s University, Ontario, and is now Adjunct Professor of Post-Colonial and Animal Studies at the University of New England, Australia.
Graham Huggan is Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds, UK.