Dr. Shruti Das - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Dr. Shruti Das
Routledge eBooks, Apr 17, 2024
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Jun 1, 2018
Literary Studies
Since the publication of Arran Stibbe's critically acclaimed book Ecolinguistics: Language, E... more Since the publication of Arran Stibbe's critically acclaimed book Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology, and the Stories We Live By (2015), a new approach to ecolinguistics has emerged, one that focuses on how much ecologically constructive or destructive views are included in the discourses contained in the "stories" that people "live by" every day. Toni Morrison, expanding the possibilities of African American ecological writing, explores the healing impact of nature that is reflected in the "stories" the characters "live by" in her novels. Her writings build a narrative frame in which nature is the benefactor and healer. On the one hand the narratives poignantly and painfully expose the psychological or emotional wounds suffered by the African- Americans and on the other depict nature as a healer of these wounds. Our concern in this paper is Morrison’s novel Home (2012). It is a story of a veteran soldier, Frank Money who returns home, with...
Human rights are politicised and cannot realistically be said to exist only to protect the weak f... more Human rights are politicised and cannot realistically be said to exist only to protect the weak from abuse, being co-opted as an instrument through which the politics of power is advanced. Despite human rights becoming increasingly widespread, the omnipresence of human rights rhetoric has not been very clear, and the meaning of the language of human rights has become confused and contested. ?Everyone should know why human rights are important, that we do need little human rights just now, and that literature does have a capacity to minister to that need,? says Joseph Slaughter in his book, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form and International Law (2007). It is important to understand the nuances of human rights. It has been defined a
Arthur Miller’s All My Sons was first staged in New York in 1947, two years before the publicatio... more Arthur Miller’s All My Sons was first staged in New York in 1947, two years before the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex with the famous opening sentence of its Book Two: ?One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman?. Beauvoir only foregrounded the fact that the prevailing ideas about women are socially and culturally constructed, not naturally created. Summing up Beauvoir’s argument , Margaret Walters says : ?All through history woman has been denied full humanity, denied the human right to create, to invent, to go beyond mere living to find a meaning for life in projects of everwidening scope ? ?She is seen by and for men, always the object and never the subject?? (98). Miller’s idolization of Kate Keller in the play written before Beauvoir’s sensational uncovering of the subordination of women throughout human history, only serves to confirm the feminist attack on male white literature produced by male white authors as being complicit in ?othering? women
Literary Studies, 2022
Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” which he says means “getting others to want the outcomes ... more Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” which he says means “getting others to want the outcomes that you want.” The world’s largest democracy India is also the home of millions of impoverished people including many indigenous tribes that are impediments to the desired rapid economic and political growth of India. Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C. K. Janu, written by Janu Bhaskaran and translated from the original Malayalam into English by N. Ravi Shanker, narrates the story of the struggle of the Adiyas, a tribal people of Kerala, whose identity and livelihood is threatened when they are dispossessed of their ancient land in the forest. The tribe is led by Janu, a girl from their community, whose struggles against the soft power of the State inform the crisis of existence of these tribal people. This paper will attempt to study the crisis of existence of the tribal people in the narrative of Mother Forest using Nye’s theory of “soft power”. This paper will attempt to expose...
Natya or theatre is an ancient practice of entertainment in India. Surviving texts and treatises ... more Natya or theatre is an ancient practice of entertainment in India. Surviving texts and treatises suggest that theatre existed in the Indian subcontinent prior to the vedic age. Both Gods and human beings were said to be connoisseurs of art. The golden period of Indian theatre, mostly in Sanskrit, is said to have lasted until the 5th centuryAD, soon after which the flow of Sanskrit drama waned 1. In spite of dramatic literature receding, performance traditions thrived through dancers, musicians, singers, and storytellers. The basic aesthetics of dramaturgy survived, morphed into various variants, through the traditional folk and classical forms. Paul Kurtz 2 suggests that the Rig Veda gives evidence that dramatic theatre in India came into being around the eighth century B.C. According to Kurtz, the Jataka stories illustrating Indian life between 600 B.C. and 300 B.C. contain evidences of theatre. Like its Greek counterpart Indian drama and theatre owes its origin to religion. The two great Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have contributed vastly to performing arts in ancient times. Kurtz observes that, like the cult of Dionysus, Vedic religion also held the seeds of dramatic theatre in India. In the fourth century B.C, actors were employed to perform at temples in the honour of Gods. Also, some villages exhibited public performances in the form of Stree Preksha (women's drama) and Purusha Preksha (men's drama) (66). The Natyshastra of Bharata Muni brings out the evidence of theatre arts at festivals and public celebrations during the Maurya Dynasty, founded by King Chandragupta (reigned 321 B.C-297 B.C). The Maurya Dynasty ruled India for a long period. During this period, kings sent Buddhist missionaries to various places like Ceylon,
The narrator in The Bluest Eye states that "A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of ... more The narrator in The Bluest Eye states that "A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment" (162). The little black girl is Pecola Breedlove who is dissatisfied with the world around her. She is born into a society that is confused as it shuns its own cultural values and craves for self-gratification in the culture of the whites. In the novel this tendency of the society finds its symbolic and subversive expression in Pecola's quest for blue eyes which represent the western/racist ideals of beauty. The quest results in the suffering and anguish of the blacks which is presented by Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye. This article proposes to analyse how the subversive politics of racism is operative in the narrative in the novel.
SCHOLARS: Journal of Arts & Humanities, 2021
This paper argues that difficult relationships in human life followed by memories, introspection,... more This paper argues that difficult relationships in human life followed by memories, introspection, retrospection, foreshadow, flashback, and awful remembrances are coloured by pain and trauma. Unresolved trauma affects the way one perceives others and oneself in relation to others, which has a significant impact on relationships and often results in behaviour that is not conducive to healthy relationships. Complicated, disordered feelings and distressing emotions that give rise to anxiety find an expression in relationships, either overtly or covertly. This paper will focus on how the characters, suffering from anxiety due to stressed relationships, in the short stories in The Progress of Love, written by Alice Munro, employ defence mechanisms to repress their trauma and project a different version of themselves as responsible individuals who are capable of leading a normal life. The dialectic of trauma covertly present in the narrative will be unravelled using Judith Herman’s theory...
Literary Studies, 2021
This paper attempts to locate Hughes’s poetic diction as Ecriture feminine since like feminist po... more This paper attempts to locate Hughes’s poetic diction as Ecriture feminine since like feminist poetry the diction of his poetry is rebellious and questions the hierarchical structure of society where White people hold more power and promote the idea of racial superiority. His desire to express the angst of the Blacks finds currency in the definition and explication of feminine writing. The focus of this paper will be on analysis of the poetry of Langston Hughes in the light of ecriture feminine in order to show how Hughes counters hegemony’s repressive rhetoric, challenges the loss of agency through the language of the dominant class and recreates another symbolic order.
Fakir Mohan Senapati’s famous novel Six Acres and a Third is set in colonial India describing an ... more Fakir Mohan Senapati’s famous novel Six Acres and a Third is set in colonial India describing an Indian society during the early decades of the nineteenth century, telling a tale of wealth, greed, property and theft. The novel invites an active relationship between the narrator and the reader. The narrator engages and holds the attention of the reader throughout with his unique style of narration. Humour forms the basic tool of narration demanding the reader’s participation in the critique of society. Satire, paradox, contradiction and irony which are the four pillars of humour are abundantly evinced in the narrative. Fakir Mohan uses humour to target and criticize the then colonial social and political institutions. Thus, humour along with wit and intelligence comes in handy to expose the oppression and chicanery of the novel’s villain, Mangaraj. Integrated into the allusive discourse of the narrative, humour attains subversive qualities in critiquing trickster-like and exposing co...
South Asia emanates from the great Indian sub-continent and comprises India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka,... more South Asia emanates from the great Indian sub-continent and comprises India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Bhutan, Nepal and Afghanistan, who have deep rooted connection through a shared history and culture. The experience of sharing a history and culture that is common, yet utterly personal, makes the literature of the region unique and provides the South Asians a common basis for understanding their position in the contemporary world. Critics of South Asian Literature mostly focus on religion, region and nationality within South Asia, but my concern in the present lecture moves beyond this. It addresses the problems of identity and survival, particularly linguistic inside a changing geography and changing society. Colonial oppression, ethnicity, religion and border issues are paramount and have led to rabid linguistic regionalism. The present discussion involves a survey of literatures in English available in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. It is important...
Foucault has defined six principles of heterotopias. In the first principle of heterotopias he ex... more Foucault has defined six principles of heterotopias. In the first principle of heterotopias he explains that all cultures have heterotopias which may be categorized as the ‘heterotopias of crisis’ and ‘heterotopias of deviation’. Crisis heterotopias are reserved, privileged or sacred spaces for members of primitive societies in “crisis”, that is, a society that maybe within a larger society but in an involuntary state of being that is different and does not appear “normal” to the outside world. Foucault believes that the first kind, that is, the heterotopias of crisis is disappearing with modernisation and giving way to the second kind which is heterotopias of deviation. This can be related to the reality of the Dongria Kondh of South Odisha, an indigenous people, who resist development and assimilation and want to continue living in their natural habitat and are considered to be other than normal by society. Developmental agencies profess a utopia for these people which becomes cou...
IUP Journal of English Studies, 2015
In postcolonial times, language has become synonymous with nationality. This notion existed even ... more In postcolonial times, language has become synonymous with nationality. This notion existed even in pre-historic times. Each nation aspires to be a linguistic entity. This presumption is drawn from evidence in Europe, as native speakers are identified by their language, such as native speakers of French, German, and Italian are Frenchmen, Germans and Italians, respectively. The single national language theory which is a product of European historical experience is problematic in South Asia, which has shown that linguistic identity and national consciousness are synonymous. Mother tongue is sacred and is a vehicle for all national endeavors. In an expanding global scenario, the survival of economy and borders depend upon communication and comprehension, English becomes the most unavoidable vehicle. While critics most often focus on religion, region and nationality within South Asia, they rarely focus on the linguistic regionalism inherent in this region and the position of English la...
University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2021
Counter-narration re-casts existing narratives and foregrounds the marginalised by giving them ag... more Counter-narration re-casts existing narratives and foregrounds the marginalised by giving them agency and performativity. They are narratives that challenge and provide resistance against dominant and hegemonic grand narratives which have been instrumental in formulating a social ideology over a long period of time making them normative. The Ramayana, an ancient epic is a multi-layered story of Prince Rama and Princess Sita and their role in the politics of power, state and patriarchy. It is a grand or master narrative that presupposes the passivity of the female as normative. It portrays Sita, King Rama’s wife, as someone who experiences marginalization and oppression and is a victim of the dominant narrative of patriarchy. This paper will use the theory of counternarrative and analyse Amish Tripathi’s novel Sita: Warrior of Mithila (2017) in order to show how he has recast Sita deconstructing the myth of passivity. Here, Sita resists prescriptive norms of the dominant narrative, w...
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 2021
War has been instrumental in destroying land and forests and thus is a major contributor to clima... more War has been instrumental in destroying land and forests and thus is a major contributor to climate change. Degradation due to war has been especially significant in Africa. The African continent, once green, is now almost denuded of its rich forests and pillaged of its precious natural resources due to the brutality of colonisation and more recent postcolonial civil wars. In Sierra Leone the civil war continued for over eleven years from 1991 to 2002 and wrought havoc on the land and forests. Thus the anxiety and trauma suffered by the people not only includes the more visible aspects of human brutality, but also the long lasting effects of ecocide which relate to climate change. Underlying narratives that address traumatic ecological disasters is a sense of anxiety and depression resulting from the existential threat of climate change. This paper demonstrates how narratives can metaphorically represent both ecocide and climate change and argues that such stories help people in tac...
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 2021
In this Introduction, we set the Special Issue on 'Tropical Imaginaries and Climate Crisis... more In this Introduction, we set the Special Issue on 'Tropical Imaginaries and Climate Crisis' within the context of a call for relational climate discourses as they arise from particular locations in the tropics. Although climate change is global, it is not experienced everywhere the same and has pronounced effects in the tropics. This is also the region that experienced the ravages – to humans and environments – of colonialism. It is the region of the planet’s greatest biodiversity; and will experience the largest extinction losses. We advocate that climate science requires climate imagination – and specifically a tropical imagination – to bring science systems into relation with the human, cultural, social and natural. In short, this Special Issue contributes to calls to humanise climate change. Yet this is not to place the human at the centre of climate stories, rather we embrace more-than-human worlds and the expansion of relational ways of knowing and being. This paper ou...
Routledge eBooks, Apr 17, 2024
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Jun 1, 2018
Literary Studies
Since the publication of Arran Stibbe's critically acclaimed book Ecolinguistics: Language, E... more Since the publication of Arran Stibbe's critically acclaimed book Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology, and the Stories We Live By (2015), a new approach to ecolinguistics has emerged, one that focuses on how much ecologically constructive or destructive views are included in the discourses contained in the "stories" that people "live by" every day. Toni Morrison, expanding the possibilities of African American ecological writing, explores the healing impact of nature that is reflected in the "stories" the characters "live by" in her novels. Her writings build a narrative frame in which nature is the benefactor and healer. On the one hand the narratives poignantly and painfully expose the psychological or emotional wounds suffered by the African- Americans and on the other depict nature as a healer of these wounds. Our concern in this paper is Morrison’s novel Home (2012). It is a story of a veteran soldier, Frank Money who returns home, with...
Human rights are politicised and cannot realistically be said to exist only to protect the weak f... more Human rights are politicised and cannot realistically be said to exist only to protect the weak from abuse, being co-opted as an instrument through which the politics of power is advanced. Despite human rights becoming increasingly widespread, the omnipresence of human rights rhetoric has not been very clear, and the meaning of the language of human rights has become confused and contested. ?Everyone should know why human rights are important, that we do need little human rights just now, and that literature does have a capacity to minister to that need,? says Joseph Slaughter in his book, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form and International Law (2007). It is important to understand the nuances of human rights. It has been defined a
Arthur Miller’s All My Sons was first staged in New York in 1947, two years before the publicatio... more Arthur Miller’s All My Sons was first staged in New York in 1947, two years before the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex with the famous opening sentence of its Book Two: ?One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman?. Beauvoir only foregrounded the fact that the prevailing ideas about women are socially and culturally constructed, not naturally created. Summing up Beauvoir’s argument , Margaret Walters says : ?All through history woman has been denied full humanity, denied the human right to create, to invent, to go beyond mere living to find a meaning for life in projects of everwidening scope ? ?She is seen by and for men, always the object and never the subject?? (98). Miller’s idolization of Kate Keller in the play written before Beauvoir’s sensational uncovering of the subordination of women throughout human history, only serves to confirm the feminist attack on male white literature produced by male white authors as being complicit in ?othering? women
Literary Studies, 2022
Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” which he says means “getting others to want the outcomes ... more Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” which he says means “getting others to want the outcomes that you want.” The world’s largest democracy India is also the home of millions of impoverished people including many indigenous tribes that are impediments to the desired rapid economic and political growth of India. Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C. K. Janu, written by Janu Bhaskaran and translated from the original Malayalam into English by N. Ravi Shanker, narrates the story of the struggle of the Adiyas, a tribal people of Kerala, whose identity and livelihood is threatened when they are dispossessed of their ancient land in the forest. The tribe is led by Janu, a girl from their community, whose struggles against the soft power of the State inform the crisis of existence of these tribal people. This paper will attempt to study the crisis of existence of the tribal people in the narrative of Mother Forest using Nye’s theory of “soft power”. This paper will attempt to expose...
Natya or theatre is an ancient practice of entertainment in India. Surviving texts and treatises ... more Natya or theatre is an ancient practice of entertainment in India. Surviving texts and treatises suggest that theatre existed in the Indian subcontinent prior to the vedic age. Both Gods and human beings were said to be connoisseurs of art. The golden period of Indian theatre, mostly in Sanskrit, is said to have lasted until the 5th centuryAD, soon after which the flow of Sanskrit drama waned 1. In spite of dramatic literature receding, performance traditions thrived through dancers, musicians, singers, and storytellers. The basic aesthetics of dramaturgy survived, morphed into various variants, through the traditional folk and classical forms. Paul Kurtz 2 suggests that the Rig Veda gives evidence that dramatic theatre in India came into being around the eighth century B.C. According to Kurtz, the Jataka stories illustrating Indian life between 600 B.C. and 300 B.C. contain evidences of theatre. Like its Greek counterpart Indian drama and theatre owes its origin to religion. The two great Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have contributed vastly to performing arts in ancient times. Kurtz observes that, like the cult of Dionysus, Vedic religion also held the seeds of dramatic theatre in India. In the fourth century B.C, actors were employed to perform at temples in the honour of Gods. Also, some villages exhibited public performances in the form of Stree Preksha (women's drama) and Purusha Preksha (men's drama) (66). The Natyshastra of Bharata Muni brings out the evidence of theatre arts at festivals and public celebrations during the Maurya Dynasty, founded by King Chandragupta (reigned 321 B.C-297 B.C). The Maurya Dynasty ruled India for a long period. During this period, kings sent Buddhist missionaries to various places like Ceylon,
The narrator in The Bluest Eye states that "A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of ... more The narrator in The Bluest Eye states that "A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment" (162). The little black girl is Pecola Breedlove who is dissatisfied with the world around her. She is born into a society that is confused as it shuns its own cultural values and craves for self-gratification in the culture of the whites. In the novel this tendency of the society finds its symbolic and subversive expression in Pecola's quest for blue eyes which represent the western/racist ideals of beauty. The quest results in the suffering and anguish of the blacks which is presented by Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye. This article proposes to analyse how the subversive politics of racism is operative in the narrative in the novel.
SCHOLARS: Journal of Arts & Humanities, 2021
This paper argues that difficult relationships in human life followed by memories, introspection,... more This paper argues that difficult relationships in human life followed by memories, introspection, retrospection, foreshadow, flashback, and awful remembrances are coloured by pain and trauma. Unresolved trauma affects the way one perceives others and oneself in relation to others, which has a significant impact on relationships and often results in behaviour that is not conducive to healthy relationships. Complicated, disordered feelings and distressing emotions that give rise to anxiety find an expression in relationships, either overtly or covertly. This paper will focus on how the characters, suffering from anxiety due to stressed relationships, in the short stories in The Progress of Love, written by Alice Munro, employ defence mechanisms to repress their trauma and project a different version of themselves as responsible individuals who are capable of leading a normal life. The dialectic of trauma covertly present in the narrative will be unravelled using Judith Herman’s theory...
Literary Studies, 2021
This paper attempts to locate Hughes’s poetic diction as Ecriture feminine since like feminist po... more This paper attempts to locate Hughes’s poetic diction as Ecriture feminine since like feminist poetry the diction of his poetry is rebellious and questions the hierarchical structure of society where White people hold more power and promote the idea of racial superiority. His desire to express the angst of the Blacks finds currency in the definition and explication of feminine writing. The focus of this paper will be on analysis of the poetry of Langston Hughes in the light of ecriture feminine in order to show how Hughes counters hegemony’s repressive rhetoric, challenges the loss of agency through the language of the dominant class and recreates another symbolic order.
Fakir Mohan Senapati’s famous novel Six Acres and a Third is set in colonial India describing an ... more Fakir Mohan Senapati’s famous novel Six Acres and a Third is set in colonial India describing an Indian society during the early decades of the nineteenth century, telling a tale of wealth, greed, property and theft. The novel invites an active relationship between the narrator and the reader. The narrator engages and holds the attention of the reader throughout with his unique style of narration. Humour forms the basic tool of narration demanding the reader’s participation in the critique of society. Satire, paradox, contradiction and irony which are the four pillars of humour are abundantly evinced in the narrative. Fakir Mohan uses humour to target and criticize the then colonial social and political institutions. Thus, humour along with wit and intelligence comes in handy to expose the oppression and chicanery of the novel’s villain, Mangaraj. Integrated into the allusive discourse of the narrative, humour attains subversive qualities in critiquing trickster-like and exposing co...
South Asia emanates from the great Indian sub-continent and comprises India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka,... more South Asia emanates from the great Indian sub-continent and comprises India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Bhutan, Nepal and Afghanistan, who have deep rooted connection through a shared history and culture. The experience of sharing a history and culture that is common, yet utterly personal, makes the literature of the region unique and provides the South Asians a common basis for understanding their position in the contemporary world. Critics of South Asian Literature mostly focus on religion, region and nationality within South Asia, but my concern in the present lecture moves beyond this. It addresses the problems of identity and survival, particularly linguistic inside a changing geography and changing society. Colonial oppression, ethnicity, religion and border issues are paramount and have led to rabid linguistic regionalism. The present discussion involves a survey of literatures in English available in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. It is important...
Foucault has defined six principles of heterotopias. In the first principle of heterotopias he ex... more Foucault has defined six principles of heterotopias. In the first principle of heterotopias he explains that all cultures have heterotopias which may be categorized as the ‘heterotopias of crisis’ and ‘heterotopias of deviation’. Crisis heterotopias are reserved, privileged or sacred spaces for members of primitive societies in “crisis”, that is, a society that maybe within a larger society but in an involuntary state of being that is different and does not appear “normal” to the outside world. Foucault believes that the first kind, that is, the heterotopias of crisis is disappearing with modernisation and giving way to the second kind which is heterotopias of deviation. This can be related to the reality of the Dongria Kondh of South Odisha, an indigenous people, who resist development and assimilation and want to continue living in their natural habitat and are considered to be other than normal by society. Developmental agencies profess a utopia for these people which becomes cou...
IUP Journal of English Studies, 2015
In postcolonial times, language has become synonymous with nationality. This notion existed even ... more In postcolonial times, language has become synonymous with nationality. This notion existed even in pre-historic times. Each nation aspires to be a linguistic entity. This presumption is drawn from evidence in Europe, as native speakers are identified by their language, such as native speakers of French, German, and Italian are Frenchmen, Germans and Italians, respectively. The single national language theory which is a product of European historical experience is problematic in South Asia, which has shown that linguistic identity and national consciousness are synonymous. Mother tongue is sacred and is a vehicle for all national endeavors. In an expanding global scenario, the survival of economy and borders depend upon communication and comprehension, English becomes the most unavoidable vehicle. While critics most often focus on religion, region and nationality within South Asia, they rarely focus on the linguistic regionalism inherent in this region and the position of English la...
University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2021
Counter-narration re-casts existing narratives and foregrounds the marginalised by giving them ag... more Counter-narration re-casts existing narratives and foregrounds the marginalised by giving them agency and performativity. They are narratives that challenge and provide resistance against dominant and hegemonic grand narratives which have been instrumental in formulating a social ideology over a long period of time making them normative. The Ramayana, an ancient epic is a multi-layered story of Prince Rama and Princess Sita and their role in the politics of power, state and patriarchy. It is a grand or master narrative that presupposes the passivity of the female as normative. It portrays Sita, King Rama’s wife, as someone who experiences marginalization and oppression and is a victim of the dominant narrative of patriarchy. This paper will use the theory of counternarrative and analyse Amish Tripathi’s novel Sita: Warrior of Mithila (2017) in order to show how he has recast Sita deconstructing the myth of passivity. Here, Sita resists prescriptive norms of the dominant narrative, w...
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 2021
War has been instrumental in destroying land and forests and thus is a major contributor to clima... more War has been instrumental in destroying land and forests and thus is a major contributor to climate change. Degradation due to war has been especially significant in Africa. The African continent, once green, is now almost denuded of its rich forests and pillaged of its precious natural resources due to the brutality of colonisation and more recent postcolonial civil wars. In Sierra Leone the civil war continued for over eleven years from 1991 to 2002 and wrought havoc on the land and forests. Thus the anxiety and trauma suffered by the people not only includes the more visible aspects of human brutality, but also the long lasting effects of ecocide which relate to climate change. Underlying narratives that address traumatic ecological disasters is a sense of anxiety and depression resulting from the existential threat of climate change. This paper demonstrates how narratives can metaphorically represent both ecocide and climate change and argues that such stories help people in tac...
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 2021
In this Introduction, we set the Special Issue on 'Tropical Imaginaries and Climate Crisis... more In this Introduction, we set the Special Issue on 'Tropical Imaginaries and Climate Crisis' within the context of a call for relational climate discourses as they arise from particular locations in the tropics. Although climate change is global, it is not experienced everywhere the same and has pronounced effects in the tropics. This is also the region that experienced the ravages – to humans and environments – of colonialism. It is the region of the planet’s greatest biodiversity; and will experience the largest extinction losses. We advocate that climate science requires climate imagination – and specifically a tropical imagination – to bring science systems into relation with the human, cultural, social and natural. In short, this Special Issue contributes to calls to humanise climate change. Yet this is not to place the human at the centre of climate stories, rather we embrace more-than-human worlds and the expansion of relational ways of knowing and being. This paper ou...