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Postcolonial ecocriticism and the limits

of Green Romanticism
a
Graham Huggan
a
University of Leeds , Leeds, UK
Published online: 05 Feb 2009.

To cite this article: Graham Huggan (2009) Postcolonial ecocriticism and the limits of Green
Romanticism, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 45:1, 3-14, DOI: 10.1080/17449850802636465

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 Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Vol. 45, No. 1, March 2009, 3–14

Postcolonial ecocriticism and the limits of Green Romanticism

Graham Huggan*

University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

Journal
10.1080/17449850802636465
RJPW_A_363816.sgm
1744-9855
Original
Taylor
102009
45
G.D.M.Huggan@leeds.ac.uk
GrahamHuggan
00000March
and
&ofArticle
Francis
Postcolonial
(print)/1744-9863
Francis
2009Ltd Writing(online)

This essay assesses the emerging alliance between postcolonial criticism and ecocriticism
in the light of continuing debates on “Green Romanticism”. It considers what is at stake
in contending positions within this debate, what contributions postcolonial writers and
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thinkers have made to it, and what some of the implications might be of bringing
postcolonial criticism and ecocriticism together, both for the reassessment of Romantic
ecological legacies and for the “greening” of postcolonial thought.
Keywords: postcolonialism; ecocriticism; Romanticism; environmentalism; colonialism

It has been estimated that there are several thousand definitions of Romanticism. Postcolo-
nialism is still no match, but at the current turnover rate, it might get there yet.1 Given this
dizzying plurality of definitions, it seems unwise to pronounce judgement on the relation-
ship between postcolonialism and Romanticism, but equally unwise not to engage with it.
To date, such engagements have tended to fall into four different, if roughly interrelated,
categories. The first of these categories, and the broadest, consists of the relations between
Romanticism and colonialism.2 These relations suggest “the discursive presence of Empire
in the seemingly autonomous literary work” of the Romantic period (Richardson and
Hofkosh 2) – a presence charted in the work of numerous postcolonial literary/cultural
scholars, the outstanding example here, of course, being the wide-ranging work of Edward
Said.3 In accordance with Said, the mutual entanglement of Romanticism and colonialism
not only demonstrates the far-reaching cultural work of Empire, but also points to the press-
ing need to re-examine the limiting European parameters within which that work has
frequently been compressed. As Mary Louise Pratt evocatively puts it, “one might be
tempted to argue that Romanticism originated [not in Europe, but] in the contact zones of
America, North Africa and the South Seas” (138); while David Scott, agreeing with Pratt,
emphasizes the mutation of English Romanticism “in the direction of a greater ideological
and historical self-consciousness” (59), a “post-Orientalist revolution” that takes it beyond
the documented upheavals in America and France (59).
A second strand, linked symbolically to the first one, consists of the anti-colonial dimen-
sions of Romanticism. The Romantic sensibility – such as it exists – has often been associated
with the desire, however ambivalent or cosmetic, to improve the conditions of the disem-
powered and exploited (Scott 60). Consider the wide range of abolitionist writing that
emerged in America and Europe in the period roughly from the late 18th to the early 19th
century, a maverick example being the work of the acculturated “English gentleman”
Olaudah Equiano, whose justifiably famous slave narrative is memorable not just for the
powerful impact of its (post-) enlightenment prose, but also for the execrable quality of its

*Email: g.d.m.huggan@leeds.ac.uk

ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online

© 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17449850802636465
http://www.informaworld.com
 4 G. Huggan

(pre-)Romantic verse.4 Consider also the widespread use of the figure of the Romantic revo-
lutionary across a vast swathe of 19th- and 20th-century non-European as well as European
anti-colonial writing: encompassing the poetry of Césaire as well as Shelley, and encapsu-
lated in C.L.R. James’s historical masterpiece The Black Jacobins (1938), his in many ways
paradigmatically Romantic homage to the Haitian revolutionary leader and cultural hero
Toussaint Louverture.5
James’s book, suggests David Scott in his 2004 study Conscripts of Modernity, cuts
across the generic boundaries of romance, history and tragedy, although it could be argued
that The Black Jacobins is defined primarily by the internal contradictions already inscribed
within the capacious genre of (anti-)colonial romance. This link between romance as genre
and (anti-)colonialism constitutes the third, equally prolific strand of postcolonial Romanti-
cism, as can be seen in a wide variety of Marxian readings of colonial literature,6 as well as
in books like Scott’s that argue persuasively that “anticolonialism has [itself] been written
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[predominantly] in the narrative mode of Romance” (209).7

A fourth strand, completing the picture, provides my focal point here. This strand takes
in the debate, increasingly evident in the emergent field of postcolonial ecocriticism, on the
merits and demerits of Green Romanticism, and on the applicability of its allegedly anti-
authoritarian rhetoric both to the literary-historical relations between empire and colony
and to the raft of oppositional social and environmental movements currently confronting
the gulf that separates so-called “developed” from “developing” worlds. In the rest of this
essay, I want to tease out this strand by considering briefly: (1) what is at stake in contend-
ing positions within the Green Romanticism debate; (2) what contributions postcolonial
writers and thinkers have made to it; and (3) what some of the implications might be of
bringing postcolonial criticism and ecocriticism together, both for the reassessment of
Romantic ecological legacies and for the “greening” of postcolonial thought. I will then
close with some thoughts on a writer who seems ideally suited to the tasks of postcolonial
ecocriticism, the 20th-century Australian poet Judith Wright, whose work emerges out of a
Green Romanticist legacy of environmentalism it partly challenges but never quite
manages, or indeed quite wishes, to reject.
The “greening” of Romanticism is usually associated with the work produced in the
last couple of decades, notably Jonathan Bate’s two seminal studies Romantic Ecology:
Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) and The Song of the Earth (2000).
However, its roots can be traced back further, via the emergence of ecocriticism in the 1970s
and the socialist ecology of cultural critics like Raymond Williams, whose 1973 classic The
Country and the City includes a chapter on environmental implications in the work of the
fringe-Romantic poets William Blake and John Clare. The teleology sometimes set up
between Romanticism and ecocriticism, made explicit in the subtitle of Laurence Coupe’s
Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (2000), is thus somewhat
misleading, although it is generally acknowledged that Green Romanticism is the basis for
any historically informed ecocriticism, just as Romanticism at large is imbricated with some
of the central tenets of ecology, e.g. the notions of interdependence and intersubjectivity,
and with the idea – though one persistently disputed within both Romantic and ecological
movements – of an organic connection to, and continuum with, the natural world.8
Green Romanticism is no more uniform than Romanticism itself, nor is it tautological.
A dominant version is the one put forward by Bate, who seeks to provide an alternative view
of the Romantic ideology that stresses the centrality of place while also contesting
the stereotypical Romantic “escape into Nature”.9 This version is – broadly speaking –
historical but not historicist; in Laurence Coupe’s admirably concise formulation, it involves
an understanding of Romanticism not “as a retreat from the world, [but rather as] a new way
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 5

of comprehending the world” (15). In his “Green reading” of Wordsworth in Romantic

Ecology, Bate contends, for example, that “if one historicizes from an ecological viewpoint
– a respect for the earth and a scepticism as to the orthodoxy that economic growth and mate-
rial production are the be-all and end-all of human society – [then] one finds oneself
squarely within the Romantic tradition” (9). This understanding of Romanticism has the
advantage of being in sharp alignment with many of the issues of contemporary Green poli-
tics as Bates identifies them: “the greenhouse effect and the depletion of the ozone layer,
the destruction of the tropical rainforest, the pollution of the sea, and, more locally, the
concreting of England’s green and pleasant land” (9). It has the disadvantage, however – as
the last term on Bate’s list suggests – of reinforcing a narrowly Anglocentric view of the
environmental movement that exists in tension with the broad-based social reformism inher-
ent in many, though by no means all, forms of Green philosophy today. It is also notably
out of kilter with, indeed apparently opposed to, the transformative possibilities offered by
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current varieties of socialist ecology; as Bate says, drastically oversimplifying the case, in
Romantic Ecology: “I suggest that we make the move which many ex-Marxists have made,
predominantly in Germany but increasingly in Britain: the move from red to green [… We]
should pause to consider the possibility that the revolutionary torch now burns in the hands
of greens rather than reds” (9).10 This view is very different from that of, say, Raymond
Williams and his descendants, or the sizeable number of radical ecologists who maintain the
inseparability of environmental and social (human) issues and concerns.11
Romantic legacies, in short, are far from being uniformly accepted within the broad
field of Green literary/cultural studies. Regular complaints continue to be made about
Romanticism’s elitism, eurocentricism and regressivism; nonetheless, the consensus view
seems to be that reappraisal, rather than mute acceptance or premature dismissal, might be
best suited to understanding the impact of Romantic legacies on Green thinking in the
modern globalized world.12 Thus, while the “greening” of Romanticism is certainly tied in
with the radicalization of ecology in the second half of the 20th century – in a set of moves
that gave rise to many of today’s explicitly politicized forms of environmental advocacy –
it is by no means coterminous with it, nor is the sometimes unwieldy combination of liter-
ary-critical and bioethical practices that currently operates under the umbrella term
“ecocriticism” simply continuous with Green Romanticist perceptions of, or attitudes
towards, the contemporary late capitalist world.13 Rather, each of these fields – loosely
defined – is underscored by a series of constitutive tensions, whether these are seen in terms
of “arcadian” and “imperial” counter-impulses (Worster) or as contemporary evidence of a
top-down managerialism that posits human beings, particularly from the economically
advantaged countries, as technological controllers of, rather than organic participants in, the
natural world (O’Brien).
Ecology’s own link with empire is, of course, well charted in the work of environmental
historians like Richard Grove and Alfred Crosby, which demonstrates both the ecological
impact – often negative – of colonialism and, paradoxically, the emergence of a conserva-
tionist consciousness among colonial naturalists, scientists and administrators, who came
quickly to realize the need to protect the natural resources they needed to carry on their work
in the world. Grove’s and Crosby’s work helped lay the foundations, in turn, for the emerg-
ing sub-discipline of postcolonial ecocriticism, which has come increasingly to prominence
in the last decade or so, and which is now frequently acknowledged as one of the most
important crossover areas of both postcolonial and environmental studies as they seek to
keep pace with a critically endangered world (Buell, Writing). Emerging for some time
now, the field is perhaps showing signs of having finally become critically established,
with special issues of journals devoted to the subject, several monographs-in-waiting from
 6 G. Huggan

postcolonial critics, and a larger number of “postcolonially” inflected books and articles
from the “environmental” side.14
At first glance, the fields of postcolonial criticism seem quite far apart in their
objectives, the former motivated primarily by the ongoing struggle for social justice in the
(neo-)colonial contexts of dispossession and exploitation, the latter taking in a phenomeno-
logically wider but, at the same time, more geographically and culturally restricted variety
of non-human, as well as human, considerations and concerns. However, the two fields have
more in common than is usually acknowledged. Both are invested, for example, in the situ-
ated critique of current globalizing practices that use capitalist ideologies of development to
justify corporate expansionism and technological managerialism; and both are equally
concerned with critically analysing the representational mechanisms that lend legitimacy to
these practices, demonstrating the power of culture to (re)shape the word and, through it,
the world. Both, indeed, are “worldly” concerns in the sense that their interpretations are
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often cast, however indirectly, as interventions, following on from the obvious truism that
the significance and effectiveness of literary and other cultural texts “are matters having to
do with ownership, authority, power, and the imposition of force” (Said, Culture 48). Both,
finally, are deeply ethical in their commitment to ideals of social transformation and
improvement, and to bettering the conditions, in particular, of the impoverished, exploited
and oppressed. This commitment also carries a historical charge; as Robert Young puts it in
his 2003 Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction – itself partly an exercise in postcolo-
nial ecocriticism – “Postcolonialism names a politics and philosophy of activism that
contest the disparit[ies of social and economic inequality], and in so doing continues in a
new way the anti-colonial struggles of the past” (4).
This is only one understanding, of course, among many others, of postcolonialism, a
field which, much like ecocriticism, is racked by its own internal conflicts and which, also
like ecocriticism, has been haunted by its almost congenital inability to determine its own
parameters or even to provide a convincing explanation of itself. Part of the difficulty for
both fields is their respective practitioners’ heightened – some might say suffocating –
awareness of the provenance of their own critical and theoretical vocabularies, vocabularies
arguably indebted to the very small-“r” romanticisms that postcolonial critics, in particular,
often explicitly reject. Young’s work is a good example of this double bind in so far as it
rehearses many of the romanticisms from which it ostensibly wishes to detach itself, a
double bind also immediately apparent in, say, the “eco-rhetoric” surrounding post-tsunami
reconstruction or the western relief of chronic poverty in Africa, much of which runs the
risk of reifying third world suffering and victimage while staging another colonial spectacle
of white redemption that aestheticizes underdevelopment even as it claims to ease the
burden of the oppressed. Some sections of Young’s Postcolonialism: A Very Short Intro-
duction seem to come straight out of the manual of Green Romanticism although, to be fair,
he is well aware of this; aware too that “greenness”, in some cases, is more an accessory
than a necessity: or, as the journalist Charles Moore sardonically puts it, “When everyone
turns environmental, prosperity has truly arrived” (qtd in Guha and Martinez-Alier xiv).
Work such as Young’s, seen at its best, provides the space for a dialogue between
the radical traditions of socialism and environmentalism – a dialogue both attentive to the
European origins of these movements and equally open to the alternative historical trajec-
tories and socio-political considerations of the “non-West”. Accordingly, Young’s own
primary references are from India and Africa: the Chipko (Himalayan) anti-deforestation
movement in the 1970s, perhaps the best-known example of a modern peasant uprising orga-
nized around eco-socialist principles; the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada
Movement)’s continuing struggle against the damming of the Narmada river in north-west
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 7

India and its consequent displacement of hundreds of thousands of local Adivasis (Indigenous
people), a cause which has been given worldwide – if not always welcome – publicity in the
writings of Arundhati Roy; and the Greenbelt Movement in Kenya, initiated by the feminist-
activist Wangari Maathai in response to local women’s concerns about the degradation of
their environment.15 Although Young doesn’t mention this, all three movements can be seen
to some extent as operating within a Green Romanticist tradition, making free use of commu-
nitarian and organicist rhetoric and playing strategically on the anti-colonial traditions of
peasant revolt. However, the most important point here is that, in each case, the movement
was/is inflected through local channels and adapted to immediate material circumstances.
It was Arundhati Roy’s perceived overriding of the local that got her into trouble with
the Narmada Bachao Andolan, even though it ensured her a wide audience for her celebrity
activism – an instance, perhaps, of the small-“r” romanticization of perceived “peoples of
nature” that has more in keeping with western cosmopolitan conscience-making than with
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the solidarity of the oppressed.16

Part of the problem was Roy’s emotional appeal to the universality of the Green cause,
which led her to overlook the situated environmentalisms practised by, for example, her
countrywomen Bina Agarwal and Vandana Shiva, whose scholar-activism, more aligned
than hers with a specifically Indian eco-socialist tradition, is also more inclined than hers
to factor in cultural difference to social/environmental struggles and debates. This embrace
of difference – often seen as being one of postcolonial ecocriticism’s strong suits – is
similarly useful in counteracting the kind of sweeping judgements that first world environ-
mentalisms are perhaps unfairly known for, and that have led such sceptics as David
Harvey to think aloud that “there is almost always an authoritarian edge somewhere in
ecological politics” (177). It also complicates the picture of a clean divide between first
world (so-called “full-stomach”) and third world (“empty-belly”) environmentalisms,
another small-“r” romantic formulation that underestimates the situatedness and variability
of social conflicts over natural resources, preferring instead to assimilate these to a master
narrative of resistance that pits local (grassroots) heroes against global (corporate) villains
in what the historian Ramachandra Guha describes derisively as a “’cowboys’ and
‘Indians’ vision of history in which the world is divided up into good and bad guys”,
whosoever and wheresoever they are (Guha and Martinez-Alier 166). These “black and
white portraits”, says Guha, “are especially congenial to social activists: they were once
characteristic of the Marxist and they now, sadly, appear to be characteristic of the radical
environmentalist” (166).
There is no need for postcolonial ecocriticism to succumb to these crude romantic fables;
if anything, it is more likely to be effective in guarding against them, even if postcolonial
critics and ecocritics alike aren’t always as attentive as they might be to the dangers of roman-
ticizing the oppressed. A better approach, perhaps, is to show how ecologically minded post-
colonial writers and thinkers self-consciously transform Romantic legacies even as they
embrace and extend them. One obvious example, taken from the Caribbean, is the poetry of
Derek Walcott, which, as numerous commentators have suggested, is both indebted to and
subtly subversive of the European Romantic tradition, drawing particular inspiration from
the work of the fringe-Romantic “ecopoet” John Clare.17 Another example is the work of
the Nigerian eco-activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, better known for the fate he suffered than the
fiction he produced, and often hyperbolically constructed as “Africa’s first environmental
martyr” (Nixon 233), a modern-day manifestation of the Romantic-revolutionary warrior
who eventually gave his life to the twin struggle for Indigenous political emancipation and
the right to a clean earth.18 However, my main example here is the work of the 20th-century
Australian poet Judith Wright, a poet usually seen as being committed to the basic premises
 8 G. Huggan

of Romanticism, as described by Shirley Walker in the somewhat stereotypical Romantic

checklist below:

[T]he need for a close relationship between the individual and nature, the primacy of imagina-
tion and intuition over intellect, the role of the poet and poetry in the preservation of society’s
values, and the use of the lyric form to express subjectivity. [Wright] also has an intense inter-
est, as did the Romantic poets, in the philosophy of cognition and imaginative creation [ … ]
She subscribes to the Romantic doctrine of organicism: the notion that there is an organic
relationship between the work of art, with its genesis in the unconscious level of the psyche
and its subsequent shaping and development at a more conscious level, and the germination and
evolution of a living plant. (9)

While Walker’s surface description of some of the characteristics of Romanticism might

well be contested by a modern generation of poststructuralist-influenced Romantic
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theorists, it appears at first sight to accord well with what Wright herself called the “neo-
Romantic” tendencies of her work. These tendencies, however, arguably emerge less
clearly in her poetry than in her expository essays – essays that self-consciously manipulate
the conventions of Green Romanticism in order to reflect both on the contemporaneous
politics of conservation19 and on the interconnectedness of white-settler and Aboriginal
versions of the past. Conservation, which, as Wright explains in several of the essays, is a
concept inextricably connected with the complex worldview expressed in her poetry, entails
“a new responsibility towards our environment”, one based on a committed “consideration
for the needs of things [and creatures] other than ourselves” (Because 215). While techni-
cally concerned with the responsible management of resources, conservation also consists
for Wright in the wider possibility of a “renewed humility and a revival of imaginative
participation in a life-process which includes us, and to which we contribute our own
conscious knowledge of it, as part of it, not as separate from it” (194). This conservationist
view – probably more likely today to go by other terms such as “ecological” (Bennett) – is
of a piece with Wright’s neo-Romantic conviction in the capacity of poetry to counteract
the instrumentalism of hyper-rationalist and materialistic values, and to celebrate the “total-
ity of nature” by engaging with human feelings and sympathies in a broadly intersubjective,
mutually beneficial way (202, 254).
Wright – in her essays at least – espoused what we might call a form of pragmatic ideal-
ism in which the often glaring ideological contradictions embedded within global conserva-
tionist movements were weighed against the need to enlist the public’s interest in what they
believed, however naively, to be the common conservationist cause. Unlike many of today’s
professional environmentalists, Wright had little difficulty in wedding ecological sentiment
to a broadly conceived humanist vision in which “human and humane co-operation and
creativity” were urgently needed to avoid the pitfalls of “technologizing” the earth (256).
This largely holistic view – inflected as much by neo-Buddhist as neo-Romantic sympathies
(Wright, Because) – ran the risk of overlooking structural inequalities in late 20th-century
global capitalist society, but it enjoyed the distinct advantage of making a clear link between
environmental and social issues, nowhere more apparent than in the concern for Indigenous
justice that underpins her work. In keeping with the liberal integrationism of the times,
Wright campaigned tirelessly for racial harmony and a peaceful world, both of which possi-
bilities she saw as being threatened by self-destructive tendencies within a militaristic world
order, and by Australia’s more specific reluctance to keep pace with global debates on
decolonization and civil rights.
However, even if we accept the consensus view of Wright as a poet-activist well aware
of her performative role as a public representative figure, due care needs to be taken with
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 9

the specificities of her written work. In general terms, we might describe Wright as a prac-
titioner of “ecopoetry”, in Jonathan Bate’s non-instrumentalist sense of the term as present-
ing the “language of dwelling”, rather than just providing a manifesto for “ecological
correctness” or a political vehicle for Green concerns (Song of the Earth 42).20 But Green
though Wright’s poetry is, it is often Green in a negative sense, as the expression of a histor-
ical record of social and environmental destruction or an agonized self-awareness that the
“language of dwelling” will always be elusive; thus, in the poem “Nigger’s Leap: New
England” (1946), which tells of the response to a massacre of Aborigines in Wright’s home
state (NSW), the speaker is moved to conclude plaintively: “Now we must measure / our
days by nights, our tropics by their poles, / love by its end and all our speech by silence. /
See, in these gulfs, how small the light of home” (Human 8).
This white angst is ubiquitous in Australian and other so-called settler literatures – as
well it might be – though rarely captured with such precision and troubling beauty as it is
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here. For the American critic Paul Kane, it is symptomatic of an anxiety over cultural
origins crystallized in negative visions of a land which steadfastly fails to reveal its under-
lying mysteries, and in face of which “death and darkness and absence [ … ] acknowl-
edged as the backdrop of white Australia’s history [ … ] must serve as the final measure
of speech” (159). Kane duly interprets the silences that punctuate Wright’s poetry as
attempts at self-renunciation or kenosis: as proof of the poet’s “brave engagement with all
the painful negations encountered in human life” (168). It isn’t clear here whether Kane is
exposing the negative capability inherent in Wright’s verse or imposing his own poststruc-
turalist-Romanticist agenda onto it; most probably, I suspect from his reading of Wright
and other 20th-century Australian poets, he is doing both. Kane’s own particular version
of the “gloom thesis”21 has been criticized for being unduly eurocentric, not sufficiently
attentive to regional inflection, and too concerned with placing Australian poetry in the
context of a European (more particularly British) Romantic tradition it transforms and
transposes but never quite brings itself to reject.22 However, in his defence I would say
that he is well aware of the limits of his own critical model; and conscious, too, of the
opportunity to transcend it, gesturing in the process towards the possibility of other post-
colonial Romanticisms that revolutionize the exhausted language of revolution, and that
provide a catalysing vehicle for postcolonial writers and thinkers to turn others’ pasts into
futures of their own.

Notes
1. On the postcolonial definition industry, see Slemon, whose mid-1990s article argues that western
universities are currently witnessing a “scramble for postcolonialism” in which the lead term has
effectively turned into “an object of desire for critical practice, [a] shimmering talisman that in
itself has the power to confer political legitimacy onto specific forms of institutionalised labour,
especially ones that are troubled by their mediated position within the apparatus of institutional
power” (17). More recently, see also Huggan (Postcolonial), who argues that “[p]ostcolonialism
has taken full advantage of its own semantic vagueness … yield[ing] a cache of definitions, each
of these recognised as provisional, as if in anticipation of the next to come” (1).
2. The last decade or so has produced a number of important book-length studies in this area: see,
for example, the essays collected in Richardson and Hofkosh and Fulford and Kitson; see also the
excellent monographs of Coleman, Leask and Makdisi, all of which look – directly or indirectly
– at the different ways in which Romantic tropes were deployed, not just as a means of justifying
and/or embellishing the imperial “civilising mission” but also of articulating the anxieties that this
self-appointed mission inevitably bred.
3. The key text here is not the widely cited if insufficiently analysed Orientalism (1978), but the
technically superior Culture and Imperialism (1993). As Said argues in the later work, it is not
 10 G. Huggan

possible to look at the historical impact of “European culture” – and its legacy for modern Euro-
pean societies – without simultaneously looking at the workings of European Empire; the two are
inextricably entangled in one another, even if the connections between them continue to be stra-
tegically forgotten or misunderstood. The presence of Empire, suggests Said, is as likely to be
repressed as explicitly demonstrated; it constitutes a key element of the “political unconscious”
(Jameson) across a wide range of European literary texts.
4. Technically, Equiano’s text, first published in 1789, falls outside what most literary historians
consider to be the Romantic period, a period often seen as being unofficially inaugurated with the
publication of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798. However, strict periodicity is as hazardous
for Romanticism as it is for any other broad-based literary movement. In England, much of the
literature of the second half of the 18th century anticipated tendencies and trends to be taken up
later by the poets of the Romantic movement, and if the canvas is extended to include Europe and
beyond, the picture becomes more complicated still. It is also a truism to say that what McGann
perhaps problematically calls the “Romantic ideology” affected writers differently at different
times and in different places; any attempt to normalize the movement not only goes against the
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basic aesthetic credos of Romanticism but also risks corralling it into a British/European ideolog-
ical frame.
5. Not everyone agrees with this heroic reading of Toussaint: see, for example, Aravamudan, who
makes the telling point that Toussaint, for all his revolutionary exploits, still “opposed the scrap-
ping of the sugar plantation system that had propelled the colony of Saint-Domingue into
its economic and political prominence for European interests” (14). For further readings of the
Toussaint myth, see Bongie and Forsdick.
6. See, for example, Chrisman, Dixon and McClure. Imperial romance seems to have a special affinity
for Marxist – or, which is perhaps more commonly the case in postcolonial literary studies, neo-
or post-Marxist – critics: probably the most famous example here is Jameson’s against-the-grain
reading of Conrad in The Political Unconscious (1981). The historical relationship between
Marxism and imperialism, of course, is more fraught, though as materially oriented postcolonial
critics such as Benita Parry have rightly insisted: “[a] Marxist presence [is ubiquitous and long-
standing] in the intellectual cultures of the colonized worlds” (134).
7. Like Scott, I shall place under erasure here the obvious differences between Romanticism as a
movement – or, better, a constellation of related movements – and romance as a literary genre.
Not all romances, needless to say, are Romantic; nor is Romanticism synonymous with romance.
The distinction between (“high”) Romanticism and (“small-r”) romanticism is similarly precari-
ous, as any dictionary of literary terms will tell us. Nothing is more romantic, we might be tempted
to conclude, than attempts to define Romanticism itself.
8. For a useful overview essay on ecological approaches within British Romantic studies, at least
some of which take issue with Bate, see Hutchings; for more Batean perspectives, see Garrard
and, particularly, Coupe (although several of the volume’s essays implicitly or explicitly contest
its editor’s Green Romanticist remit).
9. As Bate and other ecologically oriented scholars of Romanticism are quick to acknowledge, one
of the biggest obstacles in analysing Romantic attitudes towards the environment is the semantic
confusion surrounding the word “Nature”. Not for nothing does Raymond Williams call “Nature”
“the most difficult word in the language” (Keywords 219), and the discourse of Romanticism
hardly helps things, oscillating as it does between material (immanent) and spiritual (transcendent)
understandings of the word. For a spirited attempt to account for – without levelling out – the
many contradictions embedded in the term, see Soper; for a no less nuanced approach to the uses
and abuses of “Nature” in the history of the western environmental movement, see also Worster
and, from a more critical perspective, the essays in Adams and Mulligan, especially those by
Langton, Plumwood and Mulligan himself.
10. Bate has modified this position somewhat in more recent work, e.g. The Song of the Earth,
although his remains a largely phenomenological stance in the Heideggerian tradition, deeply
suspicious of what he sees as Marxist instrumentalist attitudes to the environment without neces-
sarily rejecting Marxism tout court as a vehicle for social justice or a means of understanding the
deleterious effects of capitalism on human/environmental relations in the (post-)industrial world.
The stigma of instrumentalism haunts eco-Marxism, although the accusation sometimes appears
to be made by those who have little detailed knowledge of Marx’s work. For a convincing
defence of eco-Marxism against charges of instrumentalism, see Harvey; far less convincing is
Pepper, who rails against the apolitical mystifications of deep-ecological critics he doesn’t always
seem to have read. See also Note 11 below.
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 11

11. See, for example, the wide-ranging work of such self-designated “eco-socialists” as David
Harvey, Carolyn Merchant and David Pepper, all of whom posit the inextricability of social
and environmental justice. As might be expected, eco-socialism covers a wide spectrum of
political views, from the social ecology of Bookchin to the eco-Marxism of Williams, to
contemporary international movements for environmental justice (Harvey 366–402). As
might also be expected, eco-socialist movements are particularly strong outside the so-
called First World, taking in a large number of grassroots and Indigenous-led initiatives
and featuring some high-profile public figures: Vandana Shiva in India, for example, or
Wangari Maathai in Kenya. To some extent, ecocritical debates over Green Romanticism
– e.g. those engaging with Bate – have tended to ignore these highly visible environmen-
talisms of the South, preferring instead to look at the environmental movement’s European
origins, although there is increasing evidence that the pendulum has now begun to swing
in the other direction, not least through the revisionist efforts of postcolonial critics.
12. See here the argument of Hugh Dunkerley, who, despite the combative title of his essay,
ends up by adopting a compromise approach to the supposed Romantic legacy of environ-
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mentalism – a position shared, with variations, by leading ecocritics like Buell, Curtin and
Garrard.
13. Unsurprisingly, there is little agreement on the basic principles for, let alone the definition
of, ecocriticism, which has developed considerably since its initial deployment by William
Rueckert in the late 1970s. For alternative understandings of ecocriticism, see the essays in
Glotfelty and Fromm and the excerpts in Coupe; for more recent views, see Garrard and
Love.
14. See, for example, Armstrong, DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley, Huggan and Tiffin, and
Mukherjee, all quite recently published or forthcoming in the next year or two; recent
special issues of Interventions and Mosaic (the latter focusing on the contiguous and itself
rapidly expanding field of animal studies); and equally recent “postcolonially” oriented
books by environmental specialists like Buell and Curtin (viz. the title of the latter’s:
Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World). It might seem pedantic here to question
labels like “postcolonial ecocriticism”, especially when such questions risk just adding
another round to each component field’s seemingly inexhaustible definition games;
however, it still seems worth asking whether postcolonial ecocriticism is best seen as a
branch of ecocriticism, as the prefix “postcolonial” implies, or whether it is more a question
of the “greening” of postcolonialism in part-response to (continuing) colonial/imperial
ecologies and what Adams and Mulligan call the “decolonization of nature” – the postco-
lonial reassessment of global environmental issues and concerns. My own provisional
answer would be that it is both, though the focus in each case needs to be adjusted. The
greening of postcolonialism, as I have suggested elsewhere, is an inevitable effect of the
recent merging of postcolonial and environmental criticism, while the decolonization of
nature has long since been one of ecocriticism’s most urgent social/environmental
concerns. For attempts to account for this convergence while simultaneously acknowledg-
ing important differences in each subject area, see Huggan and Tiffin, “Green”; see also
Nixon and O’Brien.
15. See Young, esp. 100–08. Young’s particular emphasis is on the relation between non-western
ecological resistance movements and feminism, a relation he sees – in India at least – as
often operating within the Gandhian tradition, but also as transforming it in subaltern
women’s interests, exposing the masculinist perspective of those Gandhian cooperatives that
challenge corporate profit but also look in their own way to benefit from short-term commer-
cial gain (102). For a more positive response to Gandhian ecological resistance movements,
see Curtin, Chinnagounder; for another response, closer to Young’s and also focusing on
the ecology/feminism nexus, see Spivak.
16. For alternative – though similarly critical – views on Roy’s activist work, see Huggan,
“Greening”, Mongia, and Tickell.
17. For a detailed study of the influence of Clare and other Green Romantic poets on Walcott’s
work, see Campbell’s excellent doctoral thesis; for another useful PhD thesis that looks at
postcolonial romanticisms (lower case “r”) in the work of Walcott and other Caribbean
writers, see Kamada.
18. For broadly “postcolonial-ecocritical” approaches to Saro-Wiwa’s life and work, see Nixon;
also Huggan and Tiffin, Writing Wrongs. For a wide-ranging essay that looks, indirectly if
not directly, at some of the Romantic tendencies in Saro-Wiwa’s writing, see Apter.
 12 G. Huggan

19. “Conservation” arguably now has something of an anachronistic ring to it, although some
contemporary postcolonial and/or ecocritical scholarship (e.g. Adams and Mulligan) has done its
best to rehabilitate what many environmentalists – the more commonly chosen self-designation
– increasingly see as being a historically circumscribed term.
20. “Ecopoetry”, Bate insists, isn’t quite the same thing as “Green” or “nature” poetry; rather, it
directly or indirectly engages with an ecopoetical philosophy that registers the impossible attempt
to heal the divide between nature and consciousness by reconciling instrumental and immanent
apprehensions of the earth. For a more detailed definition of ecopoetry, which Bate clearly sees
as being phenomenological in inspiration, see The Song of the Earth.
21. The “gloom thesis” is usually attributed to the Australian cultural critic John Docker, who uses it
to describe a pattern, not so much of Australian literature as Australian literary criticism, which
stresses the almost unremitting negativity of experience (as, for example, in Harry Heseltine’s
influential critical work). It is commonplace now for Australian critics to distance themselves
from the gloom thesis’s critical commonplaces, though there are one or two notable exceptions,
including within the field of postcolonial criticism (see, for example, Hodge and Mishra, who
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would be unlikely to agree with Kane but who arguably propound a “gloom thesis” of their own).
22. See, for example, my own distilled comments on Kane’s approach to Australian poetry of the
colonial period: Harpur, Kendall and Brennan “were all inspired, in different ways, by [European]
Romantic poetic traditions whose uncertain transposition onto Australia resulted in either a
productive awareness of conceptual inadequacy – an antipodean form of negative capability – or
in a compensatory nativism which could not help but seem too early, even as its Romantic deri-
vations could not help but make it seem too late” (Australian 54–55).

Notes on contributor
Graham Huggan teaches in the School of English at the University of Leeds, where he is Chair of
Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures. He is also founding co-director of the university’s cross-
disciplinary Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. Current research includes a co-written
book (with Helen Tiffin) on postcolonialism, animals and the environment and a book-length study
of celebrity conservationism in the television age.

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