Afterword: Econarratology Then, Now, and Later

Econarratology is a project born of frustration and disconnect. As a graduate student, I struggled to pair the ecocritical theory that I was reading with the postcolonial texts that I was meant to be analyzing. I valued the work of scholars such as Jonathan Bate, Lawrence Buell, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Scott Slovic for its clear-eyed insistence that the environment matters and that literary critics, as astute analyzers of the way that culture can shape our world, are well placed to study how representations of the physical world in literature can shape what Buell succinctly calls the environmental imagination. Yet, the primary texts that I was studying—narratives written by Caribbean and Black British writers—did not mesh well with this scholarship. Novels such as Sam Selvon’s A Brighter Sun and the short stories in V. S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street represent far different relationships between characters and their material environments than we find in the American and British texts that initially interested first-wave ecocritics such as Bate, Buell, Glotfelty, and Slovic. The narratives that I was reading are populated with characters that are the descendants of enslaved people and indentured laborers. These characters neither find peace and solace in nature as does the speaker of Wordsworth’s lyrical poems, nor do they look to nature as a guide for how best to live in the world as does Thoreau in Walden. Indeed, many of the characters that I was reading about, such as the unnamed narrator of Miguel Street or Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, are doing everything they can to get off the islands that, at the time of their texts’ publications, were beginning to be packaged by national governments as isolated Edenic retreats for the wealthy, white traveler. The environmental imaginations that circulate in the content of these narratives are fraught at best, downright hostile at worst. They do not seek to commune with nature, but instead represent the “natural” landscape of the post-plantation Caribbean as formed and haunted by ongoing legacies of abuse, injustice, and horror.

I knew that I had to get creative, so I began to consider other elements of the text in which to locate environmental insight. I took initial inspiration from the work of Jamaican poet Kamau Braithwaite, who states in a famous soundbite that the “hurricane does not roar in pentameter” (10). In making this statement, Braithwaite argues that literary forms carry within them “a certain kind of experience.” He thus sees the Caribbean poet trained in meters and rhyme schemes suited to British environments as facing a crisis of form, asking “how do you get a rhythm which approximates the natural experience, the environmental experience?” Braithwaite’s work helped me make the connection between form and environment and push my exploration of the environmental imagination of a text beyond its content and into its structures and building blocks.

Since I was working with narrative, and not poetry as does Braithwaite, I began to seek out environmental insight in narratological forms such as style of narration, narrative temporality and spatialization, focalization, representations of speech and consciousness, and stories embedded within larger frame narratives. I labeled this approach “econarratology,” which I defined as a mode of reading that “pair[s] ecocriticism’s interest in the relationship between literature and the physical environment with narratology’s focus on the literary structures and devices by which writers compose narratives” (Storyworld xv). I argued that econarratology was an especially promising mode of reading for “non-realist” postcolonial novels that, at the time, were largely illegible to ecocritics who tended to focus on explicit representations of wilderness, since such texts can represent site- and culture-specific environments and experiences in their macro- and micronarrative structures. I suggested that the imaginative and diegetic representations of environments in postcolonial storyworlds can provide illustrations of a locally informed and highly subjective experience of a particular space that step outside of the expectations of Western cultures—representations of environments and environmental imaginations that could encourage non-local readers to develop a greater understanding for what it is like for people around the globe to conceive...