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  • Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment ed. by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley
  • Melissa García
Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, eds. 2011. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. New york: Oxford University Press. 360 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-539442-9

For any individual living in the 21st century, ecology—the physical environment and the state of natural resources—is an ever present concern. Within the academic arena many cite the American University as the responsive leader on how people think and engage with ecology via literature. This misleading idea is precisely what Elizabeth [End Page 300] DeLoughrey and George Handley address in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. While eco-criticism is still relatively nascent in offering diversity amongst college courses, within literary theory that is focused on eco-criticism much work has already been done within postcolonial theory and criticism. This structural oversight is central to the thesis of Postcolonial Ecologies and one that all students across disciplines of study should be engaged in learning.

The introduction to this collection of essays engages various aspects of eco-critical theory. It is as poignant to the evolution of the field of study as are the individual essays. For any new student to this area of discourse as well as to those well-versed, the introduction serves as a historical review and survey of how eco-criticism and postcolonial theory have been entwined over centuries and continue to be presently. In addition to this comprehensive review of history and eco-critical discourse the editors provide constant markers of how postcolonial eco-criticism fills a vacant position within thinking of theoretical concepts at large.

A postcolonial eco-criticism then must be more than a simple extension of postcolonial methodologies into the realm of the human material world; it must reckon with the ways in which ecology does not always work within the frames of human time and political interest. As such, our definition of postcolonial ecology reflects a complex epistemology that recuperates the alterity of both history and nature, without reducing either to the other (4).

This very emphasis on the dialogue is central to what people outside of the Westernized world partaking in power continue to strive for—the dialogue that affects prosperity within their local environment. DeLoughrey and Handley further the ethos that forms postcolonial theory by drawing from Fanon, Said, and Brathwaite to illustrate how the physical land and its living condition has been central to building empire as well as altering individual lives within all corners of empires.

A significant driving force within the editor’s position as well as within each essay is the question of equality and how it is considered within the local community as well as in the greater global context. As stated in their introduction,

Our intention here is not to replace one singular founding figure or methodology with another, but rather to broaden the historical, theoretical, and geographic scope of contributions to eco-critical thought. We wish to foreground the ways in which, to borrow from Said, eco-critical discourses are ‘traveling theories’ rather than national products, and are irreducible to one geographical, national, or methodological origin (16).

Central to this idea are the varying perspectives within an eco-critical [End Page 301] aesthetics. For example the vast difference between a largely American based or Western view of conservation of wilderness as primary focus of an ecological/eco-critical field versus an emphasis on arable land, potable water, public health and so forth, what DeLoughrey and Handley refer to as “the economics of human ecology” (18). And, while this debate exists within the eco-critical discourse of the Universities of the West it is largely based on conditions of privilege amongst the global community.

Within postcolonial and eco-critical fields of study there are not many other comprehensive texts that address these two symbiotic fields of study through essays that represent a dialect “between city and country, culture and nature, metropolis and colony” (24). Therefore this text greatly serves as an instructional tool within a University course that introduces students to how these two fields have engaged for some time. The first two themes within the...

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