Intersections Between Ecocriticism and Postcolonial Studies
Keywords:
ecocriticism, postcolonial studies, anthropocentrism, Western-centrism, contemporary novel, Coetzee, J. M., Martel, Yann, Ghosh, AmitavAbstract
This article examines current attempts in literary studies to draw the postcolonial and ecocritical approaches closer together. Postcolonial studies incorporates an ecocritical perspective by acknowledging the non-human victims of colonialism, while ecocriticism is learning that it needs to distinguish between different human social groups and not talk about humanity as a whole as the perpetrator of environmental degradation. Postcolonial ecocriticism stems from the realization that Western-centrism and anthropocentrism consolidate one another. It draws attention to the principles of social ecology and the question of environmental justice, expressing concern about the fact that subaltern humans are denied access to the resources of the land they inhabit and emphasizing the sustainability of their cultural practices. Colonization has involved the anthropocentric view of the land as property and the treatment of the colonized environment as empty space. Places have been erased and turned into space, which makes these two concepts a valuable intersection point between the two approaches. The hard-won joint consideration of environmental and post-colonial social issues pertaining to neo-imperialism is advantageous to both perspectives, which can complement each other in the struggle to resist political systems of domination, which are supported by dualistic hierarchical logic. The ideological opposition between humans and non-humans has served as the basis for treating the subaltern as less than human and justifying Western man’s subjugation of the non-human world. The article analyses the themes of three contemporary novels (J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide) in order to examine the compatibility of ecocritical and postcolonial reading strategies in practice. Combining them is fraught with complexities because they caution against marginalizing the (subaltern) human at the expense of the non-human, and vice versa.References
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