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Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment
In Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examine relationships between humans, animals and the environment in postcolonial texts. Divided into two sections that consider the postcolonial first from an environmental and then a zoocritical perspective, the book looks at:
- narratives of development in postcolonial writing
- entitlement and belonging in the pastoral genre
- colonialist 'asset stripping' and the Christian mission
- the politics of eating and representations of cannibalism
- animality and spirituality
- sentimentality and anthropomorphism
- the place of the human and the animal in a 'posthuman' world.
Making use of the work of authors as diverse as J.M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Jamaica Kincaid and V.S. Naipaul, the authors argue that human liberation will never be fully achieved without challenging how human societies have constructed themselves in hierarchical relation to other human and nonhuman communities, and without imagining new ways in which these ecologically connected groupings can be creatively transformed.
- narratives of development in postcolonial writing
- entitlement and belonging in the pastoral genre
- colonialist 'asset stripping' and the Christian mission
- the politics of eating and representations of cannibalism
- animality and spirituality
- sentimentality and anthropomorphism
- the place of the human and the animal in a 'posthuman' world.
Making use of the work of authors as diverse as J.M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Jamaica Kincaid and V.S. Naipaul, the authors argue that human liberation will never be fully achieved without challenging how human societies have constructed themselves in hierarchical relation to other human and nonhuman communities, and without imagining new ways in which these ecologically connected groupings can be creatively transformed.
256 pages, Paperback
First published November 25, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 12, 2011
“One things seems certain: if the wrongs of colonialism – its legacies of continuing human inequalities, for instance – are to be addressed, still less redressed, then the very category of the human, in relation to animals and environment, must also be brought under scrutiny. After all, traditional western constitutions of the human as the ‘not-animal’ (and, by implication, the ‘not-savage’) have had major, and often catastrophic, repercussions not just for animals themselves but for all those the West now considers human but were formerly designated, represented and treated as animal.”
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examines the possible intersections between postcolonial literary studies and ecocriticism. Yet, most accurately this book offers a posthumanist intervention into the burgeoning field of postcolonial ecocriticism.
Huggan and Tiffin place not only the environment but also the question of the species line at the center of postcolonial literary concerns. They are interested in the ways the Cartesian division between mind and body, the European opposition between humans and nature, and the policing of the species line creates an imperial ideology towards the environment and the human that postcolonial ecocriticism may interrogate.
The first half of the book takes up ecocritical terrain and the second half of the book focuses on animals and the question of the species divide which he calls a “zoocritical” approach. The first chapter looks at the development of the development discourse. It looks at the strategies offered by Arundhati Roy and Ken Saro-Wiwa in the context of a surprisingly rich range of authors to develop the idea of the “counter-developmental” rather than the “anti-developmental.”
The second chapter totally fascinated me because it was all about the pastoral in settler societies. It looks at the use of pastoral by Australian poets Judith Wright and Oodgeroo Noonuccal and the South African novelists Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee. The chapter also discusses the work of V.S. Naipaul.
Because my own research deals with the pastoral, please indulge me in the rather tedious summary I’m now going to provide as a form of note-taking. Feel free to skip to Part Two where the overarching summary/review continues.
Huggan and Tiffin’s argument is that the pastoral is the literary form in which the tensions between belonging and entitlement to a place most emerge. He discusses the way the pastoral serves as bourgeois ideology. Drawing from Empson, they explain that representations of ‘simple’ folk provide ‘complex’ people with complex truths and thus the pastoral is dependent on the very class system which it claims to suspend. Its image of social harmony “conveniently forgets the division of labor that makes such productivity possible.” Huggan and Tiffan point out the European sensibility of the very form of the pastoral and the ability of the ecologue to offer up a benevolent eco-imperialism. They argue, “pastoral, in this sense, is about the legitimation of highly codified relations between socially differentiated people: relations mediated, but also mystified, by supposedly universal cultural attitudes to land. Through these and other means, pastoral ideologies tend to emphasize the stability, or work toward the stabilization, of the dominant order, in part through the symbolic management – which sometimes means the silencing – of less privileged social groups.”
Yet, despite this, the pastoral retains something of the utopian. They point to the way the nostalgic retreat into the past offers in the U.S. context the “imaginative potential for the assertion of a new, and better, world.” Its use to postcolonial critiques remains, however, in what Raymond Williams suggest is a ‘natural order’ in the pastoral that “tends to disguise a crisis of ownership.” As Huggan/Tiffin state, “Pastoral, as is perhaps most evident in the former settler colonies, affords a useful opportunity to open up the tension between ownership and belonging in a variety of colonial and postcolonial contexts: contexts marked, for the most part, by a direct or indirect engagement with often devastating experiences of dispossession and loss.”
“The ironies of pastoral are intensified, however, in contexts of contested entitlement and embattled ownership, where the plaintive search for ‘lost pastoral havens’ might well be seen as belonging to the originary structure of colonial violence itself. Pastoral, in this last sense, is a spectral form, always aware of the suppressed violence that helped make its peaceful visions possible, and always engaged with the very histories from which it appears to want to escape.”
This is all to stay that the pastoral is a useful form for postcolonial critics because the pastoral’s own anxieties can be exploited to upset the very stability (“fixity of place and security of belonging”) the pastoral proclaims and on which it depends.
PART TWO
This is where the authors switch from ecocritical to zoocritical, beginning with a thought-provoking discussion of the problem of the species divide in the context of issues of race and the discomfort with human-animal comparisons as a legacy of imperialist justifications of slavery and other cruelties on the grounds of treating humans as animals. As they state, “In condemning human genocide and slavery, we are thus almost inescapably colluding – albeit obliquely or implicitly – in the idea that it is acceptable to treat animals cruelly, but not to treat people as if there were animals. And in so doing we are also colluding in the fiction that the species boundary is a fixed one.”
The first chapter of this section looks at Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone as a response to both Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I particularly appreciated theirdiscussion of the problem of narration in telling the story from the elephants’ perspective. The second chapter then looks at Christianity and cannibalism starting with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, but moving on to Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage, Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Samuel Selvon’s Moses Ascending and J.M. Cooetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. The central question for Huggans here is the possibility of reimagining the relationship between humans and animals.
The final chapter here is about agency and sexuality and talks about Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, Peter Goldsworth’s Wish, Marian Engel’s Bear, and Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller.
The postscript deals with Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Margaret Atwood’s Ornyx and Crake.
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examines the possible intersections between postcolonial literary studies and ecocriticism. Yet, most accurately this book offers a posthumanist intervention into the burgeoning field of postcolonial ecocriticism.
Huggan and Tiffin place not only the environment but also the question of the species line at the center of postcolonial literary concerns. They are interested in the ways the Cartesian division between mind and body, the European opposition between humans and nature, and the policing of the species line creates an imperial ideology towards the environment and the human that postcolonial ecocriticism may interrogate.
The first half of the book takes up ecocritical terrain and the second half of the book focuses on animals and the question of the species divide which he calls a “zoocritical” approach. The first chapter looks at the development of the development discourse. It looks at the strategies offered by Arundhati Roy and Ken Saro-Wiwa in the context of a surprisingly rich range of authors to develop the idea of the “counter-developmental” rather than the “anti-developmental.”
The second chapter totally fascinated me because it was all about the pastoral in settler societies. It looks at the use of pastoral by Australian poets Judith Wright and Oodgeroo Noonuccal and the South African novelists Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee. The chapter also discusses the work of V.S. Naipaul.
Because my own research deals with the pastoral, please indulge me in the rather tedious summary I’m now going to provide as a form of note-taking. Feel free to skip to Part Two where the overarching summary/review continues.
Huggan and Tiffin’s argument is that the pastoral is the literary form in which the tensions between belonging and entitlement to a place most emerge. He discusses the way the pastoral serves as bourgeois ideology. Drawing from Empson, they explain that representations of ‘simple’ folk provide ‘complex’ people with complex truths and thus the pastoral is dependent on the very class system which it claims to suspend. Its image of social harmony “conveniently forgets the division of labor that makes such productivity possible.” Huggan and Tiffan point out the European sensibility of the very form of the pastoral and the ability of the ecologue to offer up a benevolent eco-imperialism. They argue, “pastoral, in this sense, is about the legitimation of highly codified relations between socially differentiated people: relations mediated, but also mystified, by supposedly universal cultural attitudes to land. Through these and other means, pastoral ideologies tend to emphasize the stability, or work toward the stabilization, of the dominant order, in part through the symbolic management – which sometimes means the silencing – of less privileged social groups.”
Yet, despite this, the pastoral retains something of the utopian. They point to the way the nostalgic retreat into the past offers in the U.S. context the “imaginative potential for the assertion of a new, and better, world.” Its use to postcolonial critiques remains, however, in what Raymond Williams suggest is a ‘natural order’ in the pastoral that “tends to disguise a crisis of ownership.” As Huggan/Tiffin state, “Pastoral, as is perhaps most evident in the former settler colonies, affords a useful opportunity to open up the tension between ownership and belonging in a variety of colonial and postcolonial contexts: contexts marked, for the most part, by a direct or indirect engagement with often devastating experiences of dispossession and loss.”
“The ironies of pastoral are intensified, however, in contexts of contested entitlement and embattled ownership, where the plaintive search for ‘lost pastoral havens’ might well be seen as belonging to the originary structure of colonial violence itself. Pastoral, in this last sense, is a spectral form, always aware of the suppressed violence that helped make its peaceful visions possible, and always engaged with the very histories from which it appears to want to escape.”
This is all to stay that the pastoral is a useful form for postcolonial critics because the pastoral’s own anxieties can be exploited to upset the very stability (“fixity of place and security of belonging”) the pastoral proclaims and on which it depends.
PART TWO
This is where the authors switch from ecocritical to zoocritical, beginning with a thought-provoking discussion of the problem of the species divide in the context of issues of race and the discomfort with human-animal comparisons as a legacy of imperialist justifications of slavery and other cruelties on the grounds of treating humans as animals. As they state, “In condemning human genocide and slavery, we are thus almost inescapably colluding – albeit obliquely or implicitly – in the idea that it is acceptable to treat animals cruelly, but not to treat people as if there were animals. And in so doing we are also colluding in the fiction that the species boundary is a fixed one.”
The first chapter of this section looks at Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone as a response to both Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I particularly appreciated theirdiscussion of the problem of narration in telling the story from the elephants’ perspective. The second chapter then looks at Christianity and cannibalism starting with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, but moving on to Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage, Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Samuel Selvon’s Moses Ascending and J.M. Cooetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. The central question for Huggans here is the possibility of reimagining the relationship between humans and animals.
The final chapter here is about agency and sexuality and talks about Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, Peter Goldsworth’s Wish, Marian Engel’s Bear, and Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller.
The postscript deals with Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Margaret Atwood’s Ornyx and Crake.
March 6, 2024
This counts, its a book and I read it. A lot of enlightening things in this! Highly recommend if you want to talk about representations of nature in literature and art, how native and indigenous representations of the land differ from colonialist narratives, the 'anthropocene', the pastoral...
January 13, 2019
gr8 book gr8 tutor
May 5, 2025
thesis lyfe
June 2, 2014
Repeats itself sometimes and it would be nice if it had included postcolonial ecocritical views on books from a wider variety of genres and time periods. But it's still informative about its subject, as well as interesting and fun to read
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews