Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization

Exploiting Eden

Sharae Deckard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415997393
• eBook ISBN: 9781135224011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This comparative study, the first of its kind, discusses paradise discourse in a wide range of writing from Mexico, Zanzibar, and Sri Lanka, including novels by authors such as Malcolm Lowry, Leonard Woolf, Juan Rulfo, Wilson Harris, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Romesh Gunesekera. Tracing dialectical tropes of paradise across the "long modernity" of the capitalist world-system, Deckard reads literature from postcolonial nations in context with colonial discourse in order to demonstrate how paradise begins as a topos motivating European exploration and colonization, shifts into an ideological myth justifying imperial exploitation, and finally becomes a literary motif used by contemporary writers to critique neocolonial representations and conditions in the age of globalization.

Combining a range of critical perspectives—cultural materialist, ecocritical, and postcolonial—the volume opens up a deeper understanding of the relation between paradise discourse and the destructive dynamics of plantation, tourism, and global capital. Deckard uncovers literature from East Africa and South Asia which has been previously overlooked in mainstream postcolonial criticism, and gestures to how the utopian dimensions of the paradise myth might be reclaimed to promote cultural resistance.

Notes

Introduction

1 Michael Wood, “The Death of Paradise,” Philosophy and Literature 21.2 (1997): 246.

2 A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966) 154, Jean Delumeau, History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition, trans. Matthew O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1995) 229. See also Henri Baudet’s Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Age (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965), Howard Rollin Patch’s The Other World According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1970), Eric Smith’s Some Versions of the Fall (London: Croom Helm, 1973), Joseph E. Duncan’s “Paradise as the Whole Earth,” Journal of the History of Ideas 30.2 (1969): 171–86, Ingrid G. Daemmrich’s Enigmatic Bliss: The Paradise Motif in Literature (New York: Peter Lang, [1997] 2003), Alessandro Scafi’s Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006).

3 Wood, 246–47.

4 Andrew Palmer, “Paradise Lost,” The Economist 17 May 2008.

5 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1981) 299.

6 Ian G. Strachan, Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2002) 4. For critical studies of the Columbian encounter, see Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991), Kirkpatrick Sale’s The Conquest of Paradise(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991). For contemporary Caribbean literature, see Lemuel Johnson’s “The Inventions of Paradise: The Caribbean and the Utopian Bent,” Poetics Today: Loci of Enunciation and Imaginary Constructions: The Case of (Latin) America: 685– 724.(1994), Beverly Ormerod’s An Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel (London: Heinemann, 1985), Emily Allen Williams’ Poetic Negotiations of Identity (Lewisten, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1999), and Timothy Reiss’s Sisyphus and Eldorado (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2002). Socio-economic studies include Albert Balink’s My Paradise is Hell (New York: Vista, 1948), James Ferguson’s Far from Paradise (London: Latin American Bureau, 1990), and F.F. Taylor’s To Hell with Paradise (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992). For North America, see Charles L. Sanford’s The Quest for Paradise (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1961), Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden (Oxford: OUP, 1964); Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale UP, 1973), Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978), and Jeffrey Knapp’s An Empire Nowhere (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992).

7 Strachan, 4.

8 For a feminist reading, see Ingrid G. Daemmrich, “Paradise and Storytelling: Interconnecting Gender, Motif and Narrative Structure,” Narrative 11.2 (2003). For materialist critiques, see Jeffrey Skoblow’s Paradise Dislocated (Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 1993) and Strachan’s Paradise and Plantation (2002). For ecocritical takes, see Richard Grove’s Green I...

Table of contents

• ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I Paradise and the New World
• II Paradise and Africa
• III Paradise and Sri Lanka
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index