Allegories of the Anthropocene (original) (raw)

Allegories of the Anthropocene, Introduction and full-text PDF

Allegories of the Anthropocene, 2019

In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how Indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: BRIDGING PERSPECTIVES FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

Journal of Higher Education and Research Society: A Refereed International, 2022

This research article explores the evolving landscape of postcolonial studies in the context of environmental challenges. Drawing from the insights of prominent scholars like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty, it delves into the intersections of postcolonialism, environmentalism, and global capitalism. The article begins by examining how some postcolonialists have reevaluated their perspectives, prompted by the pressing issues posed by environmental studies. It discusses the critical work of environmental activist Vandana Shiva, who highlights the historical connection between colonialism and the destruction of ecological diversity. Furthermore, the article navigates the diverse opinions within feminist environmentalism regarding pre-colonial cultures. A significant portion of the article delves into the concept of "spatial amnesia" as outlined by Rob Nixon and the American wilderness obsession in environmental literature. It also addresses the reluctance of postcolonial criticism to engage with environmental questions. The research article emphasizes the importance of incorporating environmental issues within the postcolonial studies canon, highlighting the struggles of environmental activists in the third world against multinational corporations. Additionally, the article explores the concept of internal colonialism in the formally decolonized world and its links to the dynamics of global capitalism. It delves into Karl Marx's notion of primitive accumulation and Rosa Luxemburg's ideas on capitalism's reliance on non-capitalist social formations. Furthermore, it discusses accumulation by dispossession and its role in neoliberal development, along with recent movements like Occupy Wall Street that shed light on systemic inequalities. The article concludes by proposing a new universalism based on species thinking, emphasizing the need for a more comprehensive historical understanding in postcolonial studies. It underscores the interconnectedness of colonial legacies and contemporary global challenges, advocating for a postcolonial critique that extends beyond the boundaries of the Anglo-American academy.

Introduction to _Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment_,(Oxford UP) 2011

Oxford University Press, 2011

The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representing what Eduoard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth." The essays are organized around a group of thematic concerns that engage culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, the lives of animals, and the relationship between the military and the tourist industry. With chapters that address works by J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Zakes Mda, and many others, Postcolonial Ecologies makes a remarkable contribution to rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing global environmental issues.

Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World

Duke University Press, 2019

Jairus Victor Grove contends that we live in a world made by war. In Savage Ecology he offers an ecological theory of geopolitics that argues that contemporary global crises are better understood when considered within the larger history of international politics. Infusing international relations with the theoretical interventions of fields ranging from new materialism to political theory, Grove shows how political violence is the principal force behind climate change, mass extinction, slavery, genocide, extractive capitalism, and other catastrophes. Grove analyzes a variety of subjects—from improvised explosive devices and drones to artificial intelligence and brain science—to outline how geopolitics is the violent pursuit of a way of living that comes at the expense of others. Pointing out that much of the damage being done to the earth and its inhabitants stems from colonialism, Grove suggests that the Anthropocene may be better described by the term Eurocene. The key to changing the planet's trajectory, Grove proposes, begins by acknowledging both the earth-shaping force of geopolitical violence and the demands apocalypses make for fashioning new ways of living.

(Re)Insurgent Ecologies: Dwelling Together Between Queasy Worlds

2019

Discourses that construct the “self” as something to be fixed, or made whole, chart a retreat from relational ecosystems back to the individual, reinforcing colonial politics rooted in bounded individualism. This project animates an ontological, relational framework that, in detaching from liberal humanist discourses of healing and “self,” makes affective links from autopoietic frameworks for healing and survival to de-colonial, sympoieitic concerns for expanded kinship. New meanings and attachments are forged within queasy border zones of incommensurability, toggling between the particular and the universal, between desires for solidarity and recognition that colonial violences continue to be unequally distributed and borne. Inhabiting these spaces as a scholar, not disentangling from the thickness of grief, means deploying methods and methodologies that can accommodate ontological disturbance and refusal as they grate against colonial logic. By recording pressure points of friction as they emerge in ordinary life, narratives, terms, and practices emerge to illuminate what it might mean to liberate “healing” from the terms of neoliberal, settler citizenship. The goal is not to resolve paradox, but to confront it by writing within and between the limits of scholarship and conventions that assume bounded self-hood. Aspiring beyond social solutions based in liberal humanist frameworks means subverting all forms of scholarly practices and categories based in Western hegemonies and hierarchies of being. What could a future look like in which co-poietic, sympoietic terms prevail; where the terms of speaking, writing, being, touching, and imagining do not hold allegiance to liberal humanist lineages of colonial selfhood?

The Colonial Anthropocene: Damage, Remapping, and Resurgent Resources

The negative effects of the colonial and modern project are becoming increasingly apparent each day. At the global scale, "the sixth extinction" is observable through the scars, disappearances, and deformations produced by colonial domination and the industrial pollution that is unevenly distributed across the planet. Algae blooms, or "red tides", and expanding plastic swirls materialize the accelerated warming of the oceans, currently measuring at the higher end of previous estimates. Such vast effects are most felt in their accumulative impact at the local level. For instance, Indigenous territories are left decimated in the wake of fracking, oil pipelines, damming, mining, and other forms of resource extraction. Steeped in polluted and unequal social ecologies, urban and rural communities of color disproportionately suffer exposure to toxicity and waste. In this slew of anthropogenic transformations, paying attention to the scale, decolonial mappings, embodiments, and experiences of violence for how we imagine beyond the colonial Anthropocene. This review essay uses the term colonial Anthropocene to attribute the source of vast damage and ruin. It reviews recent important books to argue for how we might perceive differently to remap and find sources of enlivened resurgence.

A Critical Analysis of Issues in Postcolonial Ecocriticism

Ibadan Journal of Humanistic Studies, 2020

Scholarship within literary discourse, at present, transcends the independent status for which a particular analytic paradigm is known. The irresolvable plurality of “identity” within the realm of literary criticism makes the merger of several literary theories much more seamless than in antique, medieval and renaissance periods. This merger of literary theories, however, raises more issues than answers. Therefore, this paper explores the contradictions in postcolonial-ecocriticism. It critically analyses some of the contending issues that the fusion of these two distinct fields has raised in the selected essays of Rob Nixon, Elizabeth DeLoughery, Griffin Huggan and Helen Triffin. The idea of place is the connecting rod between Postcolonialism and Ecocriticism since postcolonialism focuses on the re-imagining of the history of a colonised place while ecocriticism critically theorises for a return to or a conservation of a pristine place. One the one hand, both theories are distinct in their methodology and on the other, both seem to thrive on upturning binaries: for postcolonialism, the West/Other binary, and for ecocriticism, the Human/Nature binary. Also, postcolonialism favours discourses from and of former colonies while ecocriticism venerates the American and British models of nature. This paper therefore concludes that an understanding of a former colonised people and their attachment to place can be understood when binaries are dissolved. In critical discourse, there should be a free play and not an upturning of the West/ Other, Human/Nature dichotomies.