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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, âecological 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.â1 Life in all of its manifestations â from DNA to forests â has textual qualities; what does it mean to âreadâ 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 âEnglishâ, âAmericanâ and âNew Worldâ 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 âdrew in whole worlds we hadnât previously imaginedâ, and demanded ânew forms of writing & thinkingâ â all in order to effect âan expansion of what we could now recognize as poetryâ.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 âfor experiencing & comprehending the worldâ, through which âthe visions of the individualâ doubled as what MallarmĂ© had called âthe words of the tribeâ.3 Poetry had become a means for both ecological and transcultural, transcorporeal relation. More recently, dismayed by âan upsurge of new nationalisms & racismsâ, Rothenberg has proposed an omnipoetics in order to seek out âan ever greater assemblage of words & thoughts as a singular buttress against those forces that would divide and diminish usâ.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 donât 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 âidea of the centerâ, 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 âas an attempt to subvert the dominant paradigms of mono-perception, consumption and hierarchyâ.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 âtraditionalâ 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 âthe assumption is that identity, whether individual or communitarian, is constituted by the localâ.7 As Lynn Keller outlines, the âtenacityâ 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, âmuch as the romantic poets themselves did nearly two centuries earlierâ. Simply, the ecocritics lamented that split, and treated poetry âas a means of transcending itâ. In the New World, too, settlers had imported from Western Europe a sense of nature as something apart from human civilization, âa sacred and vanishing space offering escape from industrialized modernity, a treasured refuge for human and non-human species alikeâ.8 In ecocriticism so conceptualized, nature poems were of value because they returned readers to âa sense of being at home on earthâ, 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 Kellerâs words, âare more analogous to landfills scavenged by gulls or city boulevards awash in diesel fumesâ. Instead of trying to escape the problems of âa warming, toxified worldâ, 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 âcountryâ instead of ânatureâ to foreground the priority of Indigenous sovereignty and the continentâs 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 âvanishing natureâ 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 peoplesâ lands, labour and resources. In all, ecocritical scholarship has increasingly understood ânatureâ as thoroughly inextricable from âculture(s)â; resisting focus on romantic pastoral and depopulated âwildernessâ, for the past decade or more it has been pushing beyond narrowly conceived, Western understandings of the environment and humanityâs 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 âcancelâ 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 âcapacity to go beyond science in exploring the spiritual, psychological, and ethical implications of existing . . . within a dynamic, unfolding, and signifying universeâ.12 And, while it is true, as Rigby notes, that Martin Heidegger called upon âthe redemptive strandâ of romanticism to articulate an ethnocentric, proto-ecological fascism, it is equally true that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer relied upon âits avant-garde element in developing a proto-ecosocialist critique of industrial modernityâ13 (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 subjectâs 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, âbetween the embrace of and the resistance to global connectedness, and between the commitment to a planetary vision and the utopian reinvestment in the localâ.15 Indeed, since its publication over a decade ago, Heiseâs seminal Sense of Place and Sense of Planet has compelled ecocriticism to engage not only with âlocal placesâ but with âterritories and systems that are understood to encompass the planetâ. 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 âmight function as one useful tool among others for environmentally oriented argumentsâ, she cautions that it can become âa visionary dead end if it is understood as a founding ideological principleâ. Environmentalism, she argues, âneeds 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 connectednessâ.17
At the same time, what is equally important is that this sense of âconnectednessâ does not come at the expense of attention to local ecologies and, in particular, localized Indigenous ecological knowledges and custodial rights. Otherwise, a âglobalâ sense of the environment risks replicating older and more familiar kinds of colonization. In Heiseâs terms, this amounts to a challenge to âimagine 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 dynamismâ. With such an open-ended notion of âplaceâ, the focus for environmentalism would not be âto preserve pristine, authentic ecosystemsâ, but instead to nurture their capacity âto change and evolveâ. Nevertheless, such a resolution âraises 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 failuresâ.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 âdisruptive changeâ.
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, âthe plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, tooâ.
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 considÂeration 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 Araluenâs, âtoo littleâ.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 âfetishised landscape[s]â of an imperial ecological aesthetics.22 Second of these concerns is that, as it continues...