Caribbean Literature and the Environment (review) (original) (raw)

Introduction to _Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture_ 2005

2005

Perhaps there is no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean. Theorists such as Edouard Glissant argue that the dialectic between Caribbean "nature" and "culture," engendered by this unique and troubled history, has not heretofore been brought into productive relation. Caribbean Literature and the Environment redresses this omission by gathering together eighteen essays that consider the relationship between human and natural history. The result is the first volume to examine the literatures of the Caribbean from an ecocritical perspective in all language areas of the region. In its exploration of the relationship between nature and culture, this collection focuses on four overlapping themes: how Caribbean texts inscribe the environmental impact of colonial and plantation economies; how colonial myths of edenic and natural origins are revisioned; what the connections are between histories of biotic and cultural creolization; and how a Caribbean aesthetics might usefully articulate a means to preserve sustainability in the context of tourism and globalization. By creating a dialogue between the growing field of ecological literary studies, which has primarily been concerned with white settler narratives, and Caribbean cultural production, especially the region’s negotiation of complex racial and ethnic legacies, these essays explore the ways in which the history of transplantation and settlement has provided unique challenges and opportunities for establishing a sense of place and an environmental ethic in the Caribbean. The volume includes an extensive introduction by the editors and essays by Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen, Trenton Hickman, Shona Jackson, LeGrace Benson, Jana Evans Braziel, George B. Handley, Renee K. Grossman, Isabel Hoving, Natasha Tinsley, Helen Tiffen, Hena Maes-Jelinek, Heidi Bojsen, Ineke Phaf-Reinberger, Eric Prieto, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, as well as interviews with Walcott and Raphaël Confiant. It will appeal to all those interested in Caribbean, literary, and ecocritical studies.

Caribbean Environmentalisms : Rediscovering Agrarian Cultures in Endangered Ecologies

2008

In his often prickly homage to the city of his birth, San Juan, ciudad soñada (San Juan, Dreamed City, 2005), Puerto Rican novelist Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá's writes about the rapid and often devastating changes in the island's rural and urban landscape brought about by the shift from an agrarian to a manufacturing and tourism economy ushered by the Estado Libre Asociado (the Commonwealth) in the 1950s. "All the landscapes of my childhood have disappeared," he writes, lamenting the loss of once-familiar landscapes to make way for high-rise office buildings, condominiums for the middle classes, tourist hotels and casinos (3). He mourns the disappearance of the old road from Aguas Buenas to Caguas, "one of the most beautiful on the island, shadowed from one town to the other by a dense canopy of flame trees and jacarandas" before concluding that "the wound on [his] childhood's landscape sends shivers down [his] spine" (4). Rodríguez Juliá's elegy to this old vanished road, which I remember for the lace-like patterns created on the hot tarmac by the sunlight filtering through leafy trees and the bright-red flowers of the flamboyant tree, reminds us of how, in the Caribbean region, profound and often vertiginous changes ushered by a variety of post 1950s events-the collapse of the sugar

Caribbean Utopias and Dystopias : The Emergence of the Environmental

2010

In his often prickly homage to the city of his birth, San Juan, ciudad sonada (2005; San Juan: Memoir ofa City), Puerto Rican novelist Edgardo Rodriguez Julia writes about the rapid and often devastating changes in the island's rural and urban landscape brought about by the shift from an agrar­ ian to a manufacturing and tourism economy ushered by the Estado Libre Asociado (the Commonwealth) in the 1950s. "Todo el paisaje de mi infancia ha desaparecido" (All the landscapes of my childhood have disappeared), he writes, lamenting the loss of once-familiar landscapes to make way for high­ rise office buildings, condominiums for the middle classes, tourist hotels and casinos.' He mourns the disappearance of the old road from Aguas Buenas to Caguas, "una de las mas hermosas del pais, con sombra de pueblo a pueblo a causa de su tupido dosel de flamboyanes y jacarandas" (one of the most beau­ tiful on the island, shadowed from one town to the other by a dense ca...

Cuba entre ciclones: fronteras mercantiles y desafíos ambientales

Diálogos, 2021

In 2017, Hurricane Irma made landfall in Caibarién, in north-central Cuba. Images of a devastated forgotten coastal town catapulted to international prominence a once-thriving port for the export of sugar and sponges, left in the shadows of international tourism on the nearby keys. In 2019, a collaboration between the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project, the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation for Nature and Humanity, and the Cuban Film Institute led to filming a documentary in Cuba whose point of departure was Caibarién. The aim was to combine an environmental and commodity frontiers approach to visualize historical junctures and contemporary challenges in the context of global market inequalities and accentuating climate change. Archival research underpinned local testimonies and expert interviews, along with clips from newsreels, documentaries, and feature films, to produce Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes. This article charts the project to film the documentary; homes in on the paradoxes of living first with international tourism, Cuba's most recent commodity frontier, and then without, due to the Covid-19 perfect storm of a pandemic, likened to a category 5 hurricane; and concludes reflecting on documentary as a tool for raising awareness during the pandemic.

The environmental tragedy of Latin America and the Caribbean. Offprint

2020

This book, of which we present an preliminary offprint version in English, is the result of a collective analysis undertaken at the invitation of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) as part of the discussions supporting preparations for the thirty-eighth session of the Commission. With the collaboration of Nicolo Gligo, it was possible to bring together a group of pioneers in the analysis of sustainable development in Latin America and the Caribbean whose thinking has been informing this field of the social and scientific disciplines since the 1970s. Their different contributions are integrated into the 12 chapters of this document, which address the great issues being debated in the region and the world in relation to development and the environment. In the authors’ opinion, humanity is at a crossroads. They argue that increasing harm has been done to the planet’s biosphere, aggravated by climate change, in the context of an international economic or...

Environmental Struggles in Paradise: Puerto Rican Cases, Caribbean Lessons

Caribbean Studies, 2012

Unlike other parts of Latin America where environmental conflicts over natural resources involve mining, forests, oil or natural gas, Caribbean environmental struggles typically involve tourism development, control over coasts, and control over protected natural areas. A political ecology lens is used to orient the discussion on social forms of access and control over resources and to understand Caribbean tourism as a corporate construction of a secular paradise. Puerto Rico serves as a case study of citizen struggles involving control over their natural resources, specifically, the coasts. Two ongoing struggles are examined: 1) Vieques, where key issues are not only the scale and control of tourism development, but also the future of the Caribbean National Wildlife Refuge and the negative health consequences of military toxics; and 2) the Luquillo-Fajardo Northeast Ecological Corridor, where the issues are the balance between conservation and development and who benefits from development. entre la protección de la naturaleza y el desarrollo comercial, además de quiénes se benefician del desarrollo turístico en esta área.