Postcolonial Studies and Ecocriticism

Anthony Vital
Transylvania University

Hans-Georg Erney
Armstrong Atlantic State University

Anne McClintock’s often cited essay, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of

the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’,” first published in 1992, concerns itself, as its
title suggests, with problems of terminology. In a provocative critique, rich
in implication, McClintock finds the terms “obfuscatory” and “unstable”
while acknowledging that the field opened by postcolonial studies
represents “one of the most important emerging areas of intellectual and
political inquiry” (91, 86). Such worry about terminology is of course very
much a part of postcolonial studies; and defining “postcolonial”—and the
proper reach of “postcolonial studies”—has exercised scholars to the point
that now Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin argue that we should let the
broadest and most pragmatic definitions suffice, so long as the political
edge of postcolonial thinking is held foremost (Huggan and Tiffin 8-9).
But beyond its concern with terminology, McClintock’s essay is important
for the lines of argument it follows as she cautions against an uncritical
reproduction of postcolonial interpretation. She cautions specifically against
an inadvertent replicating of the linear temporal schemes associated with a
European colonizing modernity, which would thereby re-inscribe European
centrality even while claiming to challenge it; she cautions, too, against
using postcolonial discourse in ways that lead to a damaging blindness to
differences in regional conditions, present and past. Of special relevance
to the concerns of the articles that follow, these two lines of thought lead
McClintock to argue for a richer engagement of postcolonial studies with
material history, an engagement now clearly evident in the field, as the
introductory guide published recently by Cambridge University Press
indicates.1 Yet it needs to be pointed out that this guide, though ranging
widely in a series of excellent contributions, does not address the question
McClintock’s essay has to be valued for opening, a question addressed
by the articles published in this issue—namely, how to relate postcolonial
studies to thinking about the natural environment.
In a move that from our current vantage point appears prescient,
McClintock finds fault with the postcolonial critique of the 1980s for its

Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Vols. 13.2 - 14.1 2006-2007

4 anthony vital and hans-georg erney

silence about the complex and profoundly life-shaping linkages between

histories of colonization and current social, economic, and environmental
issues. Her strategy in developing an explanation for “the enthusiasm for
‘post’-words” (including “post-colonialism”) is to recount a contemporary
history of the global economy (and associated policies of the economically
powerful nations and institutions) that keeps its eye on the world-wide
effects of this managed drive to increased consumerism (McClintock 93).
So, in her account, if “the Four ‘miracle’ Tigers have paid for progress with
landscapes pitted with poisoned water, toxic soil, denuded mountains and
dead coral seas,” then, for countries stalled at the margins of this economy
and having to “endure the purgatory of ‘structural adjustment’,” their
people (aside from their ruling elites) have to come to terms with “economic
crisis, ecological calamity, and spiraling popular desperation” (McClintock
95, 94). This is no place to develop a full response to McClintock’s essay; we
wish simply to acknowledge it for how it revises the field of the postcolonial
in ways that prefigure a recent burgeoning interest in thinking postcolonial
issues in relation to environmental issues. McClintock’s work indicates
that such a conjunction in critical inquiry makes it impossible to separate
out social and economic processes from the domain of the cultural and that
what scholarship needs to develop is “a proliferation [emphasis in original]
of historically nuanced theories and strategies...which may enable us
to engage more effectively in the politics of affiliation, and the currently
calamitous dispensations of power” (97).
If one can read McClintock’s essay as an early intervention in postcolonial
studies that calls for recognition of the environmental, then one can read
in the work of Laurence Buell, pre-eminent North American ecocritic, a
reaching out toward postcolonial thinking from within ecocriticism. While
Buell’s first major work on ecological criticism, a landmark in the field, is
still focused primarily on the United States’ early environmental prophet,
Henry Thoreau, his subsequent contributions expand significantly in scope.
In a letter on ecocriticism published in PMLA (1999) Buell regards “colonial
discourse studies” as quite distinct from an ecocriticism that he recognizes
nonetheless as “deparochializing fast” (1091, 1092)2; yet in the same year
his article published in a special issue of New Literary History bemoans
ecocriticism’s insufficiently global scope:

[Its] untapped opportunities are still much greater than the

achievement thus far. For example, India offers distinguished
traditions of environmental historiography, ecological
science, and environmentalist thought as well as a rich literary
archive that engages environmental issues; but ecocriticism
has not, so far, tapped very deeply into it. (“The Ecocritical
Insurgency” 710)
 introduction 5

In Writing for an Endangered World, Buell reaches beyond “nature writing” to

examine varieties of literature (“in the U.S. and beyond”) so he can put “the
landscapes of exurbia and industrialization…in conversation with each
other” (7). Then, in his most recent book to date, The Future of Environmental
Criticism, Buell makes an explicit call for “a convergence of environmental
and postcolonial critique” (81)—though, understandable in a book designed
as an introductory review of the field, he does not formulate how one might
enact such a convergence. In this regard, the reach from ecocriticism toward
postcolonialism parallels postcolonialism’s reach toward ecocriticism:
the convergence remains incipient, matter still to be explored. A similar
point is made in the introduction to a cluster of essays on these two critical
discourses in a recent issue of ISLE, the foremost ecocriticism journal and
organ of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. In this
essay, Cara Cilano and Elizabeth DeLoughrey outline what they see as the
common goals of ecocriticism and postcolonialism, while recognizing some
of the tensions that might divide them. While writing for a readership of
ecocritics, they applaud ecocriticism’s “growing awareness of the insularity
of the field and its objects of literary study” (75); at the same time they call
for a determination “to think more creatively and dynamically about our
complex relationships to the environment,” which they see requiring “a
dismantling of epistemological boundaries and hierarchies and a renewed
vision of an aesthetics committed to politics” (84). Greg Garrard, in his
book-length introduction to ecocriticism (published by Routledge in their
New Critical Idiom series), may make no mention of postcolonialism or
colonial discourse beyond a brief mention of the work of Vandana Shiva; yet,
in ways that are echoed in Cilano and DeLoughrey’s call for an engagement
with contemporary politics, he does argue that ecocritics need to engage
with globalization (178). If this were to happen, then ecocritics would have
to confront the historical shaping of place and cultural identity that gives
our contemporary globalizing world its distinctive features.3
As Huggan and Tiffin indicate, any attempt at bringing these two critical
perspectives into single focus is likely—if only for reason of the logical
complexity inherent in each field—to produce a multiplicity of sometimes
only marginally related forms of interpretation (9). Yet this ought not to
discourage the attempt. The world we live in presses on us to engage in
sorting through how we might best conceptualize present and past, both
human and non-human, in ways that subvert inherited forms of domination
and open us to more promising futures. As we write this introduction we
are aware of repeated news accounts of a global food crisis, swiftly rising
prices of staple grains, increased incidence of severe hunger (and food riots)
among the global poor, and the implication in this current state of affairs of
global commodity speculation, the effects of climate change, and a Western
policy of seeking to mitigate problems caused by global warming through
6 anthony vital and hans-georg erney

the use of biofuels. In such a moment we recall the poignant words Edward
Said used in 2003 to conclude a brief article published in Counterpunch, as he
found hope for a human future in the existence of “alternative communities
all across the world, informed by alternative information, and keenly aware
of the environmental, human rights, and libertarian impulses that bind
us together in this tiny planet” (“Worldly Humanism”). Though limited,
inevitably, by institutional context, current academic attempts to develop
forms of critique allowing articulation of such impulses have their role to
play in fostering hope. The essays gathered in this issue we believe contribute
to this necessary task of reconceptualizing cultural and empirical material,
of developing the outlines for a new discursive field, as they draw together
postcolonial and ecocritical interpretation to address topics in history, social
development, and literary culture.
Future work in exploring the convergence of postcolonial and ecocritical
interpretation will be indebted to Rob Nixon’s 2005 essay, “Environmentalism
and Postcolonialism.” Here Nixon argues that ecocriticism needs to
transcend its origin in American Studies, an origin that has led ecocritics to
focus chiefly on American nature writing. He calls for an expansion of this
relatively narrow purview so that postcolonial writers with environmental
concerns, such as Nigeria’s Ken Saro-Wiwa, may get the attention they
deserve. Nixon is skeptical about the chances of generating “a global
vision from an American-centered account of environmental writing” (245)
and emphasizes the “need to provincialize American environmentalism”
(247). In following this characteristically postcolonial move, ecocritics will
need to confront the “tension between a postcolonial preoccupation with
displacement and an ecocritical preoccupation with an ethics of place” (236);
in doing so, he suggests, “[o]ur intellectual challenge […] is how to draw on
the strengths of bioregionalism without succumbing to ecoparochialism”
(238).
In the essay that opens this issue, Nixon turns from such general
considerations to enact a complex interpretation of socio-historical realities
that responds to this challenge, grasping local particularities without inviting
insularity in interpretation. Combining recognition of Wangari Maathai’s
social and environmental work with that of Rachel Carson, the essay
proposes the term “slow violence” as descriptive of a global phenomenon
affecting societies and their environments, a phenomenon rooted in a
colonizing modernity. The essay elaborates a perspective on the damage
modernity can inflict on people and other forms of life, numbing in its scale.
Yet it is not only the global reach of “slow violence” that makes it so difficult
to confront; the essay explores how its temporal scale (its very “slowness”)
makes it difficult to incorporate into narrative and for that reason difficult to
imagine coherently and to respond to creatively and effectively. What makes
Nixon’s essay important (more than the sum of its impressive insights) is
 introduction 7

the way the term he proposes permits a subtle interpretive interplay of the
local and the global, one that avoids the trap of universalizing that lurks in
postcolonial interpretation. By being purely descriptive, “slow violence”
inhibits interpretive foreclosure and encourages instead interpretive moves
that are pertinent to local or regional conditions. Yet through drawing
Maathai and Carson into single focus, “slow violence” insists as well that
we attend to commonalities recognizable as global, with an identifiable
past. Bringing into focus the difficulties of caring for place in a global
economic order shaped by neo-colonial (neo-imperial) political forces,
Nixon’s essay nonetheless offers a vision of a different kind of development.
By relating Carson’s work to that of Maathai, Nixon connects an American
writer’s powerful and influential critique of unfettered growth (a critique
characteristic of American nature writing) with the alternative model of
growth presented by Kenya’s Green Belt Movement. In its description of
that model, the essay shows that Maathai provides an impressive mode of
resistance to local and global structures of oppression, one that combines
ecological and social effectiveness—reforesting the land—with symbolic
power. The essay suggests, moreover, that Maathai’s work, through
elaborating resistance in both of these dimensions signals a kind of reform
that allows for “intergenerational optimism” among those where it is most
needed. Nixon’s focus here reminds us that the lives of those suffering most
from the effects of “slow violence” need to be, in the end, the beneficiaries
of postcolonial work. It also reminds us of the burden that modernity can
inflict on women, not only through its ordinary processes but, when women
resist, in how that resistance draws misogynistic ire from males powerful in
political and corporate establishments.
Aaron Eastley’s essay, as with Nixon’s, takes as its focus conditions
in a country with a history of having been colonized, in this case Guyana,
and reads the way tropes found in sixteenth-century accounts of British
voyages to this region find their way into accounts of late twentieth and
twenty-first century development projects. This, as Eastley argues, is
not simply a matter of textual echoes; the discursive similarities open us
to similarities in the material processes which the discourses, then and
now, help shape and legitimize, processes that have left local inhabitants
profoundly disadvantaged. Eastley’s parallel reading of Early Modern
explorers’ narratives and contemporary corporate rhetoric continues
postcolonial ecocriticism’s (and this issue’s) preoccupation with such
unstable but inescapable binaries as local/global and symbolic/material
violence. However, whereas Nixon is able to focus on community-based
efforts to resist the “slow violence” modern development can inflict on a
region, Eastley is hard-pressed to find cause for optimism. For Eastley,
as he surveys the situation in Guyana, the postcolonial condition and its
accompanying fragmentation of community, with relegation of community
8 anthony vital and hans-georg erney

fractions to subalternity, complicate local attempts at resistance to this

region’s experience of incorporation into a globalizing economy.
If Eastley focuses on the way a Circumcaribbean country such as Guyana
finds itself inserted into the global economy on unequal terms through
extractive industries such as mining and postmodern industries such as
telecommunications, Anthony Carrigan’s essay explores how development
for global tourism intersects with and affects local community interests in
the Caribbean proper, specifically on the islands of Barbados and St. Lucia.
Carrigan, though, moves beyond recounting the economic, political and
discursive forces that work to reshape local communities; he is interested
in the writing of poets (Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott) who seek
to protect both community and land from damaging development. In this
way Carrigan’s essay introduces, for this issue, the complex question of
the aesthetic product’s potential to influence socio-economic processes—
what effectiveness can such “discursive interventions” have in a local
politics that cannot avoid global economic forces? While exploring the
role a postcolonial construction of landscape and the sacred might play
in reforming a tourism industry for the benefit of local communities, he
develops a critical reading of Walcott’s and Brathwaite’s poetic work,
examining the different ways they protest against the industry’s tendency
to damage culturally and environmentally significant spaces. Pointing to
the limitations of “ecotourism,” which apologists present as a benign form
of mass tourism, Carrigan proposes the concept of “cultural sustainability”
to stress the interconnectedness of social and environmental concerns.
A second essay to examine the work of Brathwaite focuses on his apparent
nativism, linking this to a similar tendency in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. For Erin
Somerville, defense of the local from neocolonial forces can lead to a writing
of nature that ignores the evidence of nature’s global transformation in the
history of colonizing modernity. This transformation has become increasingly
apparent in recent decades, and global challenges such as climate change,
she argues, will require transnational efforts to contain them. Ngũgĩ’s and
Brathwaite’s writing of local nature in nationalist terms she finds to be out
of step with patterns of thinking we will need in an increasingly integrated
world as we come to grips with environmental problems. “Postcolonial
nature,” Somerville argues, “is distinctly international in composition” and
if “the ill health of our planet” is to be addressed, then nationalist discourses
(even those defending against predation by global economic forces) have
to be seen through and left behind. Somerville’s essay, through its lines of
argument, enacts a critique of a version of the “ecoparochialism” that Nixon
warns of and, interestingly for postcolonial studies, does so while reading
writers not from comfortable areas of North America, but from regions of
the world that foster a strong desire to discontinue neocolonial assaults on
both people and land.
 introduction 9

The remaining two essays continue this exploration of the aesthetic

dimension for the kind of cultural awareness it can open. The first of
these, by Rachel Azima, analyzes Jamaica Kincaid’s collection of essays,
My Garden (Book):, for how it absorbs the idea of a “postcolonial nature”
into the fabric of personal identity. For if, as Huggan and Tiffin suggest,
a green postcolonialism provides “conceptual possibilities for a material
transformation of the world” (10), then such conceptualizing will necessarily
include a related rethinking of identity. Azima responds to Nixon’s
challenge (to respond to the “tension between a postcolonial preoccupation
with displacement and an ecocritical preoccupation with an ethics of place”)
while reaching conclusions about Kincaid’s work different from those in
O’Brien’s important essay, “The Garden and the World.” For Azima, Kincaid
enacts a “creative defiance” in both her garden and her narrative to develop
a sense of belonging to place despite “postcolonial displacement.” Kincaid
emerges from Azima’s reading as valuable for how she models a way to
grasp the local while being acutely sensitive to colonial and postcolonial
disruptions—and so also for how she delineates the subjective complexity
of a “transnational ethics of place” (Nixon 239). The last essay—by Alexa
Weik, on Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide—serves as a valuable bookend to
this issue which starts with Nixon’s essay on “slow violence.” Considered
together they reflect some of the diversity in approaches to thinking
through postcolonial and environmental concern. Whereas Nixon opens
a perspective on material conditions through a descriptive term, one that
points to phenomena in need of interpretation specific to local conditions,
Weik reads a work of fiction in terms of a unifying theory in order to reflect
on the historical processes the novel recounts and interprets. Weik draws
on a new book by Ursula K. Heise, which argues for the acceptance of “eco-
cosmopolitanism,” a form of cosmopolitanism which extends its reach to
take into account non-human life and in this way theorizes a rich form of
inclusiveness, grasping interconnections among the local and the global, the
human and the non-human. In the narrative construction of Ghosh’s novel
Weik finds a similar attempt to “resist a marked dichotomy of the local and
the global,” to envision place, with its life-forms and material energies, in a
complex dialectic with socio-political and economic forces of global scale.4
We value these six essays as a collection for suggesting distinct yet related
ways to bridge postcolonial and ecocritical thinking. Each in its own way
works to interpret the relation between the material and the symbolic within
the ongoing effects of a colonizing modernity, which include forms of human
displacement (whether by migration between regions or by disruption of
one’s home place by outside forces) and damage to natural environments.
Each helps develop the incipient convergence that recent writing has begun
envisioning (and that McClintock and Buell, from within their different
fields, called for some years before). Read together, they contribute to
10 anthony vital and hans-georg erney

what Cilano and DeLoughrey have termed “this necessary conversation”

(80), broad in geographical scope and exposing forms of domination that
accompany a modernity rooted in colonial processes.5 How to form critical
discourses that bear such historical reach along with implications for future
well-being, that foster respect for the local along with an understanding of
how global forces influence local life, that recognize human rights along
with respect for the planet’s life and life-support systems—this would seem
to be the promise as well as the imperative inherent in bringing together
postcolonial and ecocritical interpretation.

Notes

1. Neil Lazarus, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary

Studies, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004). See also the earlier volume that Lazarus edited
with Crystal Bartolovich, Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies.
2. Similar appeals for a broader conception of ecocriticism, one which
identifies a need to go beyond attention to North American nature
writing and British Romanticism, can be found in other work published
around this time. See, for example, Patrick D. Murphy’s Further Afield
in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature and Karla Armbruster and
Kathleen R. Wallace’s Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries
of Ecocriticism.
3. There is something artificial (and no doubt contentious) in distinguishing
scholars who move from primarily postcolonial work to incorporate
environmental concern from those who move in the other direction.
The point is the convergence and not the direction traveled. So in this
list of important publications we avoid such distinction (as much as
possible)—though the very nomenclature does carry the ghost of this
difference (“green postcolonialism” or “postcolonial ecocriticism”?).
For an early intervention into ecocriticism with postcolonial concern
in mind, see Dominic Head’s “The (Im)Possibility of Ecocriticism.” For
recent and now frequently cited essays on problems with and possibilities
for the convergence, see Graham Huggan’s “’Greening’ Postcolonialism:
Ecocritical Perspectives” and Rob Nixon’s “Environmentalism and
Postcolonialism.”
For work that explores this convergence in a largely Australasian
context see a book recently published and reviewed in this issue: Helen
Tiffin’s edited volume, Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and
Empire. And for work that explores the convergence in an African
context see Byron Caminero-Santangelo’s “Different Shades of
Green: Ecocriticism and African Literature.” See also Anthony Vital’s
“Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction: J.M. Coetzee’s The
 introduction 11

Lives of Animals and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness,” as well as his
article, “Toward an African Ecocriticism: Postcolonialism, Ecology
and Life & Times of Michael K.” Julia Martin has long been working
on environmental issues and adapting ecocritical thinking to a South
African context—see especially “Long Live the Fresh Air! Long Live!
Environmental Culture in the New South Africa,” and “New, with
Added Ecology? Hippos, Forests and Environmental Literacy.” Dan
Wylie, of Rhodes University, deserves mention for his work organizing
an annual colloquium, “Literature and Ecology,” starting in 2004, where
scholars can explore writing about nature and colonial history.
In this current brief introduction, we need to acknowledge five other
introductory essays, all of them published in 2007, all of them valuable
in their scope, and all important in the perspectives they develop. Their
existence made an elaborate introduction of our own redundant. See
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s “Green Postcolonialism,” Helen
Tiffin’s “Introduction” in Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and
Empire, Cara Cilano and Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s “Against Authenticity:
Global Knowledges and Postcolonial Ecocriticism,” Susie O’Brien’s
“‘Back to the World’: Reading Ecocriticism in a Postcolonial Context,”
and Ursula K. Heise’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism.”
For additional work on issues relevant to the convergence of
postcolonialism with ecocriticism, we recommend the books referred to
in this issue’s review articles—as well as, of course, the review articles
themselves.
4. In the years since its publication, Ghosh’s novel has turned into
something of a touchstone text for postcolonial ecocritics. Hardly any
conference panel on ecocritical approaches to South Asian literature
appears to be complete without at least one presentation on The Hungry
Tide, and several articles have been published on the text, including
Pablo Mukherjee’s “Surfing the Second Waves: Amitav Ghosh’s Tide
Country” and Rajendar Kaur’s “‘Home Is Where the Oracella [sic] Are’:
Toward a New Paradigm of Transcultural Ecocritical Engagement in
Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.”
5. Here we would like to acknowledge with gratitude the contributors of
this issue’s review articles, who have through their work developed
lines of thought engaging in this “necessary conversation.”

Works Cited

Armbruster, Karla, and Kathleen Wallace, eds. Beyond Nature Writing:

Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: U of Virginia
P, 2001.
12 anthony vital and hans-georg erney

Bartolovich, Crystal, and Neil Lazarus, eds. Marxism, Modernity, and

Postcolonial Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Buell, Lawrence. “The Ecocritical Insurgency.” Ecocriticism. Spec. issue of
New Literary History 30.3(1999) 699-712.
---. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation
of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.
---. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary
Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
---. “Letter,” PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1090-92.
---. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the
U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001.
Caminero-Santangelo, Byron. “Different Shades of Green: Ecocriticism and
African Literature.” African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and
Theory. Eds. Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson. Oxford: Blackwell,
2007. 698-707.
Cilano, Cara, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey. “Against Authenticity: Global
Knowledges and Postcolonial Ecocriticism.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment 14.1 (Winter 2007): 71-87.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge,
2004.
Head, Dominic. “The (Im)Possibility of Ecocriticism.” Writing the
Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature. Eds. Richard Kerridge and Neil
Sammells. London: Zed Books, 1998. 27-39.
Heise, Ursula K. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism.” PMLA 121.2
(Mar. 2006): 503-16.
Huggan, Graham. “’Greening’ Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives.”
Modern Fiction Studies 50.3 (Winter 2004): 701-33.
Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. “Green Postcolonialism.” Interventions
93.1 (2007): 1-11.
Kaur, Rajendar. “’Home is Where the Orecella [sic] Are’: Toward a New
Paradigm of Transcultural Ecocritical Engagement in Amitav Ghosh’s
The Hungry Tide.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
Environment 14.1 (Winter 2007): 125-41.
Lazarus, Neil, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies.
Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
Martin, Julia. “Long Live the Fresh Air! Long Live! Environmental Culture in
the New South Africa.” Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook.
Ed. Patrick D. Murphy. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998. 337-43.
---. “New, with Added Ecology? Hippos, Forests and Environmental
Literacy.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 2.1
(1994): 1-11.
 introduction 13

McClintock, Anne. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-

Colonialism’.” Social Text 31/32, Third World and Post-Colonial Issues
(1992): 84-98.
Mukherjee, Pablo. “Surfing the Second Waves: Amitav Ghosh’s Tide
Country.” New Formations 59 (Autumn 2006): 144-57.
Murphy, Patrick D. Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature.
Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2000.
Nixon, Rob. “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism.” Postcolonial Studies
and Beyond. Eds. Ania Loomba et al. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005. 233-51.
O’Brien, Susie. “‘Back to the World’: Reading Ecocriticism in a Postcolonial
Context.” Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and Empire. Ed.
Helen Tiffin. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 176-99.
---. “The Garden and the World: Jamaica Kincaid and the Cultural Borders
of Ecocriticism.” Mosaic 35.2 (June 2002): 167-84.
Said, Edward W. “Worldly Humanism v. the Empire-Builders.”
Counterpunch 4 Aug. 2003. 25 July 2005 <http://www.counterpunch.
org/said08052003.html>.
Tiffin, Helen. “Introduction.” Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and
Empire. Ed. Helen Tiffin. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. xi-xxviii.
Vital, Anthony. “Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction: J.M.
Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness.”
Journal of Southern African Studies 31.2 (June 2005): 297-313.
---. “Toward an African Ecocriticism: Postcolonialism, Ecology and Life &
Times of Michael K.” Research in African Literatures 39.1 (Spring 2008):
87-106.