Ecocriticism of the Global South

Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Vidya Sarveswaran

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780739189115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The vast majority of existing ecocritical studies, even those which espouse the "postcolonial ecocritical" perspective, operate within a first-world sensibility, speaking on behalf of subalternized human communities and degraded landscapes without actually eliciting the voices of the impacted communities. Ecocriticism of the Global South seeks to allow scholars from (or intimately familiar with) underrepresented regions to "write back" to the world's centers of political and military and economic power, expressing views of the intersections of nature and culture from the perspective of developing countries. This approach highlights what activist and writer Vandana Shiva has described as the relationship between "ecology and the politics of survival," showing both commonalities and local idiosyncrasies by juxtaposing such countries as China and Northern Ireland, New Zealand and Cameroon. Much like Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development, this new book is devoted to representing diverse and innovative ecocritical voices from throughout the world, particularly from developing nations. The two volumes complement each other by pointing out the need for further cultivation of the environmental humanities in regions of the world that are, essentially, the front line of the human struggle to invent sustainable and just civilizations on an imperiled planet.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The Environmentalism of The Hungry Tide
• “The Land Was Wounded”: War Ecologies, Commodity Frontiers, and Sri Lankan Literature
• Scenes from the Global South in China: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetic Agency for Labor and Environmental Justice
• Literary Isomorphism and the Malayan and Caribbean Archipelagos
• Wai tangi , Waters of Grief, wai ora , Waters of Life: Rivers, Reports, and Reconciliation in Aotearoa New Zealand
• Fish, Coconuts, and Ocean People: Nuclear Violations of Oceania’s “Earthly Design”
• Intimate Kinships: Who Speaks for Nature and Who Listens When Nature Speaks for Herself?
• Redefining Modernity in Latin American Fiction: Toward Ecological Consciousness in La loca de Gandoca and Lo que soñó Sebastian
• Northern Ireland ↔ Global South
• “Decline and Fall”: Empire, Land, and the Twentieth-Century Irish “Big House” Novel
• Landscape and Animal Tragedy in Nsahlai Nsambu Athanasius’s The Buffalo Rider : Ecocritical Perspectives, the Cameroon Experiment
• Ecocriticism beyond Animist Intimations in Things Fall Apart
• Ecocriticism, Globalized Cities, and African Narrative, with a Focus on K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents
• Environmental and Cultural Entropy in Bozorg Alavi’s “Gilemard”
• Environmental Consciousness in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction
• Index
• About the Contributors