Transcultural Ecocriticism

Global, Romantic and Decolonial Perspectives

Stuart Cooke, Peter Denney, Stuart Cooke, Peter Denney

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350121652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

Bringing together decolonial, Romantic and global literature perspectives, Transcultural Ecocriticism explores innovative new directions for the field of environmental literary studies. By examining these literatures across a range of geographical locations and historical periods – from Romantic period travel writing to Chinese science fiction and Aboriginal Australian poetry – the book makes a compelling case for the need for ecocriticism to competently translate between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, planetary and local, and contemporary and pre-modern perspectives. Leading scholars from Australasia and North America explore links between Indigenous knowledges, Romanticism, globalisation, avant-garde poetics and critical theory in order to chart tensions as well as affinities between these discourses in a variety of genres of environmental representation, including science fiction, poetry, colonial natural history and oral narrative.

1

Thinking about transcultural ecocriticism

Space, scale and translation

Stuart Cooke and Peter Denney

We present the following collection of chapters at a critical juncture in the Anthropocene. Urgently, planetary responsibility and situated knowledges need to be entwined in propositions for social and environmental justice. All around us, bodies, texts and artworks are converging in old and new forms of politics and earthly accountabilities. Never before has the world been smaller, but never has it been so overwhelming in its complexity, either. Suddenly, the critical project has become planetary, biological, even geological. As Timothy Morton puts it, ‘ecological science, with its three-kilometer ice cores and its close reading of the weather, has transformed the environment into a gigantic library, a palimpsest of texts waiting to be read.’¹ Life in all of its manifestations – from DNA to forests – has textual qualities; what does it mean to ‘read’ such a staggering variety of data? The use of imaginative, synthetic scholarship has never been more important; reading, interpretation and translation have become not just critical but essential skills. Transcultural ecocriticism emerges in response to these concerns.

Next to alarm at the looming planetary emergency, we are inspired by the trajectory of a century or more of avant-garde poetics and criticism, particularly as it has crystallized in revised formulations of ‘English’, ‘American’ and ‘New World’ poetics. Here the path was lit by those like Jerome Rothenberg, who, from the 1960s onward, helped to inaugurate a radically new conception of poetry, which ‘drew in whole worlds we hadn’t previously imagined’, and demanded ‘new forms of writing & thinking’ – all in order to effect ‘an expansion of what we could now recognize as poetry’.² Crucially, combining myriad traditions of global poetics along with a bold, neo-romantic fervour, the new poetry was no longer literature per se but rather a means ‘for experiencing & comprehending the world’, through which ‘the visions of the individual’ doubled as what Mallarmé had called ‘the words of the tribe’.³ Poetry had become a means for both ecological and transcultural, transcorporeal relation. More recently, dismayed by ‘an upsurge of new nationalisms & racisms’, Rothenberg has proposed an omnipoetics in order to seek out ‘an ever greater assemblage of words & thoughts as a singular buttress against those forces that would divide and diminish us’.⁴

If an omnipoetic assemblage that reaches towards the infinite strays too far from the bounds of analytical precision, then a transcultural ecocriticism might nevertheless retain its germinal impulses. Such an approach recognizes not only that Western literatures are but a minority portion in a much larger compendium of global literatures, but also that there are vital exchanges and parallels between and across many of these literatures. We don’t want to stop here, either; the whole world is out there. Accordingly, we are interested in pursuing the opportunities proposed by the ecological text for more-than-human relation. One aim in this context might be to theorize how the creative formations of other animals, plants, insects and forces can be drawn into relation with some of the discourses surrounding human art.⁵ As much as possible, we seek here to abandon what Marcella Durand calls the ‘idea of the center’, venturing instead into a dynamic system where the values of all living and non-living things are contextually integrated, and the myriad perspectives of all things are explored ‘as an attempt to subvert the dominant paradigms of mono-perception, consumption and hierarchy’.⁶ Implicit to transcultural ecocriticism is a radical, decolonial theorization, where Western modes of conquest, categorization and extraction are checked in order to embrace a multi-vocal array of complex expressions. There is potentially an infinite variety in such an array; therefore, a transcultural ecocriticism attempts to embrace the myriad ways in which an ecological system might articulate both itself and the connections between its various parts.

If there is a ‘traditional’ ecocriticism, it relies upon romanticism. Often inflected through Heideggerian and phenomenological accounts of unitary, coherent subjects, the first waves of ecocriticism often focused on how texts might cultivate deep and lasting attachments to particular, cherished places. By and large, in traditional ecocriticism ‘the assumption is that identity, whether individual or communitarian, is constituted by the local’.⁷ As Lynn Keller outlines, the ‘tenacity’ of romanticism in ecocriticism is evidenced by the fact that, until the early years of the new century, many environmental critics continued to lament what they perceived to be the increasing separation of industrialized humans from the natural world, ‘much as the romantic poets themselves did nearly two centuries earlier’. Simply, the ecocritics lamented that split, and treated poetry ‘as a means of transcending it’. In the New World, too, settlers had imported from Western Europe a sense of nature as something apart from human civilization, ‘a sacred and vanishing space offering escape from industrialized modernity, a treasured refuge for human and non-human species alike’.⁸ In ecocriticism so conceptualized, nature poems were of value because they returned readers to ‘a sense of being at home on earth’, and allowed at least momentary solace from city life.⁹ Like the literature it privileged, early ecocriticism sought an experiential immediacy in nonurban environments.

However, more recent ecocritical work has sought out poetry and fiction that, in Keller’s words, ‘are more analogous to landfills scavenged by gulls or city boulevards awash in diesel fumes’. Instead of trying to escape the problems of ‘a warming, toxified world’, ecocriticism has embraced them.¹⁰ Indigenous ecological knowledges have also played a significant part in interrogating the split between urban and nonurban spaces; in Australia, for example, many have adopted ‘country’ instead of ‘nature’ to foreground the priority of Indigenous sovereignty and the continent’s material-semiotic-spiritual complex, which includes human and non-human societies in an entangled, polyvocal network. In this context, much of the anxiety of early ecocriticism about a ‘vanishing nature’ is inseparable from the cultural heritage of those ecocritics themselves: until recently, ecocriticism has been predominantly the concern of white, European scholars who, much as they might lament the fact, were beneficiaries of European invasion, colonization and theft of Indigenous peoples’ lands, labour and resources. In all, ecocritical scholarship has increasingly understood ‘nature’ as thoroughly inextricable from ‘culture(s)’; resisting focus on romantic pastoral and depopulated ‘wilderness’, for the past decade or more it has been pushing beyond narrowly conceived, Western understandings of the environment and humanity’s place therein.¹¹

Transcultural ecocriticism emerges from this milieu. We hope that the following collection of essays is a sign not only of the increasing diversity of knowledge systems that inform ecocritical scholarship, but also of the exciting contributions being made by scholars from around the Pacific Rim, that great site of transcultural permeation, and beyond. Being mindful of the problematic heritage of ecocriticism in romantic thought, however, our response here is not to ‘cancel’ romanticism or bury it until its absence feeds some form of neurosis, but rather to acknowledge the power of contemporary romantic scholarship and to examine ways in which it might still contribute to transcultural criticism. After all, Kate Rigby reminds us that part of the enduring value of romantic literature lies in its ‘capacity to go beyond science in exploring the spiritual, psychological, and ethical implications of existing . . . within a dynamic, unfolding, and signifying universe’.¹² And, while it is true, as Rigby notes, that Martin Heidegger called upon ‘the redemptive strand’ of romanticism to articulate an ethnocentric, proto-ecological fascism, it is equally true that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer relied upon ‘its avant-garde element in developing a proto-ecosocialist critique of industrial modernity’¹³ (and inspired the new poetries of which people like Rothenberg were a part). As we show in this book, romanticism is much larger and more interesting than its early ecocritical ambassadors made out.¹⁴

With this in mind, we seek to interrogate the phenomenological immediacy of the unitary, European subject’s experience of unspoiled nature by drawing on the proliferating diversity of subaltern perspectives from around the globe. This tension is reflected in the environmental movement more broadly, which has been spliced, as Ursula Heise has argued, ‘between the embrace of and the resistance to global connectedness, and between the commitment to a planetary vision and the utopian reinvestment in the local’.¹⁵ Indeed, since its publication over a decade ago, Heise’s seminal Sense of Place and Sense of Planet has compelled ecocriticism to engage not only with ‘local places’ but with ‘territories and systems that are understood to encompass the planet’. Rethinking an orthodoxy of early ecological thought, Heise demonstrates with characteristic precision how excessive focus on local belonging can be detrimental to global environmental movements.¹⁶ While a sense of place ‘might function as one useful tool among others for environmentally oriented arguments’, she cautions that it can become ‘a visionary dead end if it is understood as a founding ideological principle’. Environmentalism, she argues, ‘needs to foster an understanding of how a wide variety of both natural and cultural places and processes are connected and shape each other around the world, and how human impact affects and changes this connectedness’.¹⁷

At the same time, what is equally important is that this sense of ‘connectedness’ does not come at the expense of attention to local ecologies and, in particular, localized Indigenous ecological knowledges and custodial rights. Otherwise, a ‘global’ sense of the environment risks replicating older and more familiar kinds of colonization. In Heise’s terms, this amounts to a challenge to ‘imagine local environments less as foundations for an unalienated existence than as habitats that are ceaselessly being reshaped by the encroachment of the global as well as their own inherent dynamism’. With such an open-ended notion of ‘place’, the focus for environmentalism would not be ‘to preserve pristine, authentic ecosystems’, but instead to nurture their capacity ‘to change and evolve’. Nevertheless, such a resolution ‘raises the difficult question of how an endorsement of constant transformation and change would allow one to discriminate between the inherently dynamic evolution of ecosystems and the kinds of disruptive change that might ultimately lead to serious ecosystemic problems and failures’.¹⁸ Across vast regions of the world, with their millennia of attentiveness to more-than-human systems, Indigenous knowledges can, along with the environmental sciences, best determine what constitutes ‘disruptive change’.

We present these chapters as a collective response to some of the most pressing concerns in contemporary ecocritical discourse. First of these concerns is that, as a critical methodology that attempts to recover the agencies of all living things and life-worlds, ecocriticism needs to acknowledge the full complexity of earthly histories, including, as Joy Harjo writes, ‘the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, too’.

Talk to them,

listen to them. They are alive poems.¹⁹

In citing Harjo, a Muscogee Creek Native American poet, we are also signalling that proper acknowledgement involves the decolonization of Western institutions, knowledges and political systems, not to mention careful consid­eration of the many inextricable connections between Western thought and Eastern, Indigenous and other knowledge systems since at least the 1500s. Relative to such a project, this collection of essays is, to use a term of Evelyn Araluen’s, ‘too little’.²⁰ We urge readers to consider a burgeoning diversity of First Nations scholarship as a central component of any ecocritical method,²¹ and in order to avoid the ‘fetishised landscape[s]’ of an imperial ecological aesthetics.²² Second of these concerns is that, as it continues...