Reviews

MOLLY NICHOLS

Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment

by Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin
Routledge, 2010, 245 pp., ISBN 978-0-415-34458-6

Postcolonialism and ecocriticism can appear fraught with tension.

Postcolonialism is often seen as anthropocentric, primarily concerned
with social justice, and emphasising concepts such as hybridity and
displacement. Ecocriticism, on the other hand, is often considered to be
earth-centred, primarily concerned with animal rights and environ-
mental conservation, emphasising natural purity and ‘belonging’.
Environmental writing and criticism have also been associated with
some white North American and British authors who have participated
in suspect enterprises, such as the formation of national parks that have
displaced indigenous people. Postcolonial thinkers argue that social
issues are so grave for human beings that they need to be addressed
first, before putting energy toward nonhuman beings. However, such
characterisations can be challenged. Postcolonial writers and activists
were focusing on the environment long before ecocriticism as a field
had developed. For example, Wilson Harris’s work from Guyana is
deeply engaged with the natural world, and the Indian writer Vandana
Shiva is an environmental pioneer. And the first issues of the journal
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE) included
writers concerned with ecofeminism, race, and globalism.
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin demonstrate the solidarity of
these two fields in their recent book Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature,
Animals, Environment. One of the first book-length studies to unite these
disciplines explicitly, this important volume offers two scholars’
illustrative close readings carefully positioned among key issues in
the fields. The introduction provides an excellent overview of
postcolonial ecocriticism’s current status, followed by Huggan and
Tiffin’s version of a postcolonial-ecocritical ‘way of reading’ (p. 13).
One of the most compelling features of this project is that – rather than
applying an ecocritical lens to postcolonial texts (or vice versa) – the
authors present readings that are postcolonial and ecocritical at the
same time. They interpret postcolonial texts, by authors such as
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Arundhati Roy, J. M. Coetzee, Jamaica Kincaid, Amitav Ghosh, and

Zadie Smith, as equally important environmental works. Huggan and
Tiffin effectively blur the boundaries of these disciplines, demonstrat-
ing how together they can challenge ‘continuing imperialist modes of
social and environmental dominance’ (p. 2).
In the first chapter, they consider the ways Ken Saro-Wiwa and Roy
critique the social and environmental effects of capitalist resource
extraction in neo-colonial settings. The postcolonial-environmental
fusion is clearly evident in the work of these two important writers and
activists. Saro-Wiwa fought the Nigerian government and oil compa-
nies’ devastation of his Ogoni land and people (which cost him his life),
and Roy trenchantly opposes large dam projects in India. Huggan and
Tiffin alert us to the importance of the ways these struggles are
represented in each author’s writing. They note that while Roy is
convinced that sometimes writers need to ‘take sides in protesting
against flagrant social and/or environmental injustices’ (p. 34), the
form in which she writes is unstable. For example, Roy’s ‘The Greater
Common Good’ (1999)

effectively deconstructs many of its own best arguments by drawing

attention to itself as a playful piece of investigative writing . . . [it] raises
the larger question of how to harness the resources of aesthetic play
to reflect on weighty ethical issues, as well as to serve a variety of
real-world needs and direct political ends. (p. 49)

This interpretation serves as a crucial example of the place of the

aesthetic in Huggan and Tiffin’s conception of postcolonial ecocriti-
cism. The authors insist that postcolonial ecocriticism ‘preserves the
aesthetic function of the literary text while drawing attention to its
social and political usefulness, its capacity to set our symbolic
guidelines for the material transformation of the world’ (p. 14). Saro-
Wiwa and Roy’s literary forms challenge their activism by acknowl-
edging complexity, while also recognising that nuanced understanding
allows for more legitimate efforts toward meaningful social change.
Huggan and Tiffin also intervene in the discourses of ‘sustainability’
through their reading of Patricia Grace’s Maori text Potiki (1986).
Indigenous people have often been essentialised and glorified for
remaining ‘local’ and living in ‘harmony’ with the natural world.
Huggan and Tiffin argue that this text defies those characterisations by
capturing a ‘balance between [embedded and interconnected narra-
tives that] is continually renegotiated by a shifting community of tellers
and listeners that is at once profoundly local and inextricably
connected to the wider world’ (p. 70). Many ecologists argue, contrary
102 Critical Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 1

to some ecocritics, that ‘sustainability’ does not have a model of

homeostasis in the natural world. According to Huggan and Tiffin,
Potiki’s inclusion of a dynamic play of voices reflects an unstable
ecological condition, one susceptible to disruption and change. They
insist that Grace’s book is not about romanticising the local and
asserting the fixity of place; instead, it endorses the community’s ‘most
urgent struggle for the freedom to negotiate the terms of its own
engagement with a global modernity it cannot do without’ (p. 71).
Huggan and Tiffin also contribute to a recent trend of scholarship that
reclaims the pastoral genre as having a ‘high degree of ideological
flexibility’ and not being ‘inherently conservative’ (p. 85). They argue
that South African and Caribbean writers have used the pastoral to re-
imagine new conceptions of belonging, acknowledging both dwelling
and displacement. The genre serves as a powerful way for writers to
address both postcolonial and ecological issues simultaneously.
The second half of the book engages the growing field of
zoocriticism. Huggan and Tiffin argue that postcolonial themes of
‘otherness, racism and miscegenation, language, translation, the trope
of cannibalism, voice and the problems of speaking of and for others’
offer ways to ‘re-theorise the place of animals in relation to human
societies’ (p. 135). They make astute connections between the apparent
lack of language, consciousness, and agency in colonised peoples and
in animals, citing texts such as The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe. They
further contend that Cartesian dualities of mind over body, and reason
over emotion, have provided justification for such misconceptions.
Fundamental to this study is an interrogation of the category of
‘human’ as it has been opposed hierarchically to ‘nature’ and ‘animal’
throughout history. This line of analysis is critical, especially if we
consider philosopher Val Plumwood’s point that without seeing nature
as inferior, we cannot justify the ill treatment of any beings considered
‘close’ to it based on their race, gender, class, sexuality, or species. If it is
ethically acceptable to harm and kill any being designated as
nonhuman ‘such abuses will continue, irrespective of what is
conceived as the species boundary at any given time’ (p. 137). Huggan
and Tiffin acknowledge that the ‘dreaded comparison’ (Spiegel)
between the cruel treatment of slaves and the abuse of factory farm
animals may appear to many people as offensive. However, they argue
these injustices are based on a common system of hierarchy and
domination, and efforts to combat harm done to any beings must
‘proceed together’ (p. 138).
Just as Chinua Achebe critiqued Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
(1901) for its racist depiction of African people as ‘absent referents’
(p. 144), Huggan and Tiffin argue that the text is also speciesist for not
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mentioning the elephants who have been mass slaughtered for ivory.
They proceed to discuss, in one of the most compelling readings in
Postcolonial Ecocriticism, how Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone (1998)
seeks to ‘bring elephants into genuine presence’ (p. 149). The novel is
told from their perspective; elephants are given ‘language, complicated
consciousness, prescience, cultural complexity, memory and rituals of
mourning, the experience of trauma, and the possession of a form of
religion’ (p. 150). Huggan and Tiffin argue that animals are often used
in literature as allegorical representations of human beings, but here, to
discourage this tendency, humans are positioned as a constant threat
to the elephants’ existence. The form of the novel allows readers to
empathise with the elephants and their complex individual traits,
inviting the potential for completely new conceptions of the worth and
value of animals. This shift in thinking about human/animal relations
necessitates a discussion about eating. Huggan and Tiffin offer a useful
consideration of portrayals of cannibalism in literary texts, arguing that
they have often been used to instil fear of the ‘other’ and to serve a
completely symbolic function. They make the controversial claim that
because it is not necessary for humans to eat animals, carnivory is also
symbolic; it is an ‘expression of the power to dictate the categories of
‘‘edible’’ and ‘‘inedible’’ and a potent symbol in the discourse of
‘‘othering’’‘ (p. 178). These interpretations challenge readers to
reconsider something as fundamental as their diets.
Huggan and Tiffin assert that postcolonialists and ecocritics alike are
concerned with the ‘dilemmas involved in conserving endangered
ecosystems and animals when the livelihoods of local (subaltern)
peoples are simultaneously put at risk’ (p. 185). This issue serves as a
key site of tension between the fields and implies that, at some point,
prioritisation is necessary: either humans or nonhumans must take
precedence. Amitav Ghosh appears to address this concern in his book
The Hungry Tide (2005), a popular text for postcolonial ecocritics, but
Huggan and Tiffin challenge Ghosh for not going far enough. The main
character, an American environmentalist, is confronted with a brutal
revenge killing of a tiger. She eventually empathises with the villagers,
but she (rather conveniently on Ghosh’s part) is in West Bengal to save
endangered river dolphins, who pose no threat to humans. Huggan
and Tiffin laud the novel’s call for ‘no conservation without local
consultation and participation’, but they also critique it by claiming
that ‘the much more intractable problem of tiger sanctuary is thus
displaced by the relatively easy ‘‘dolphin solution’’’(p. 188). Ghosh,
indeed, has evaded the very dilemma he raises.
Huggan and Tiffin’s project ends with an inquiry into the ‘post-
human’ and the ‘post-natural’. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
104 Critical Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 1

(2003) is a crucial text for the postcolonial-ecocritical project, one that

‘[acknowledges] the continuing realities of female/environmental/
human subjection’ and examines how oppression can occur in a ‘post-
bodied and post-human’ world, with cyborgs and genetically modified
hybrids (p. 211). Huggan and Tiffin ultimately argue that ‘human
liberation will never be fully achieved without radically challenging
[how] human societies have constructed themselves in [hierarchical]
relation to other societies, both human and non-human’ (p. 214). They
insist on gaining the ‘courage to imagine new ways’ in which these
societies, ‘understood as being ecologically connected, can be creatively
transformed’ (p. 215).
This book contributes powerfully to this worthwhile goal, despite
some limitations. The two halves do not often refer to each other’s
insights, nor do they always cohere into a unified argument. However,
the effort to combine the thematic postcolonial-environmental concerns
with an inquiry into animal representation is praiseworthy. Although
the authors admit that their project seeks to consider multiple
approaches, rather than to answer questions and offer solutions, they
still might have developed a conclusion that better reflected post-
colonial ecocriticism and its potential for future study. In addition, it is
evident that one of the main goals of this book is to include a
consideration of nonhuman life forms, but they fail to mention where,
or if, a line ever needs to be drawn to determine how we treat other
living beings. Peter Singer, one of the first thinkers to expose the ills of
speciesism, uses sentience and the capacity to suffer as his criteria.
Some ecological ethicists see the limitations of his thinking as being
hierarchical, but no one can deny that in order for humans (and other
organisms) to live, other organisms have to die. What is the basis for
determining our relationship, for example, to plants? Finally, more
explicit thoughts about how their project could contribute to
interdisciplinary efforts that seek to combat social and environmental
injustice would further strengthen their claims that the literature and
criticism can be a catalyst for social change. Huggan and Tiffin prove
that postcolonialism and ecocriticism can be fused beneficially; they
model this valuable way of interpreting literature and secure a space
for the budding field of postcolonial ecocriticism.

Further reading
Buell, Lawrence, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and
Literary Imagination (Malden: Blackwell, 2005).
Curtin, Deane, Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World (Lanham MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).
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DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., Renée K. Gosson and George B. Handley,

Introduction to Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature
and Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005).
Plumwood, Val, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (New
York: Routledge, 2002).
Shiva, Vandana, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Cambridge:
South End Press, 1997).