In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Cross-Pollination:Ecocriticism, Zoocriticism, Postcolonialism
  • Aarthi Vadde (bio)
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. 245 pp. $35.95 paper.

Postcolonial critique remains an important force within the crowded field of literature and globalization because of its commitment to analyses of power. Such analyses reveal the persistence of colonial inequities into the present day and, even more crucially, identify new guises of imperial power that continue to shape national and transnational politics across the global North and South. Postcolonial ecocriticism, one of the fastest growing subfields within postcolonial studies, maintains these salutary features of the postcolonial by directing our attention to the specifically environmental dimensions of literary works. For example, postcolonial ecocritics have focused on the often overlooked nonhuman elements within canonical literature and brought attention to contemporary literature that responds to histories of settlement and conservation, ecological disaster, and the inequitable distribution of resources and waste. Engaging diverse practices of representation in classic and emergent literature, these critics place renewed pressure on the nature/culture and human/animal binaries that facilitate imperial privilege and colonial dispossession.

Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin's Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment offers a rich and timely discussion of the ecocritical turn within postcolonial literary studies. [End Page 565] This volume is an introduction to the field and is thus especially valuable to readers invested in postcolonial studies but new to ecocriticism. Scholars already immersed in postcolonial ecocriticism will see that Huggan and Tiffin avoid the pitfalls of reductionism that can sometimes weaken introductory volumes. They do not gloss over or simplify debates among ecocritics but map them in their complexity and often in their impasses. The book's chapters offer fine readings of a variety of literary works and, purposefully or not, show the beginnings of an Anglophone canon for postcolonial environmental literature. Such a canon would include well-known contemporary writers like V. S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, J. M. Coetzee, and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as lesser-known writers (at least in the United States) such as Judith Wright, Albert Wendt, Barbara Gowdy, and Zakes Mda.

Huggan and Tiffin define their approach to postcolonial ecocriticism as uniting aesthetics and advocacy. With this combination, they "preserve the aesthetic function of the literary text while drawing attention to its social and political usefulness, its capacity to set out symbolic guidelines for the material transformation of the world" (14). Such an approach breaks with phenomenological ecocriticism, whose emphasis is on solitary modes of dwelling in nature, but does not quite join with postcolonial eco-materialism, for which the critique of colonialism is inseparable from a sharp attack on global capitalism (15).1 Huggan and Tiffin's negotiation of the aesthetic and political is consistent with a wider turn to form in studies of contemporary literature, although postcolonial scholars who identify with a more Marxist materialism may find their claims for aesthetic agency too strong. I consider Huggan and Tiffin at their best when they use literary works to recover non-Western epistemologies of nature and to calibrate the conflicting discourses that arise from various kinds of colonial encounters—the traditionally territorial ones of European imperialism and the deterritorialized forces of present-day globalization. [End Page 566]

This volume further distinguishes itself by bringing together ecocriticism and the much newer zoocriticism. Each has evolved from different interdisciplinary locations. Zoocriticism traces its roots to animal studies, a formation that draws on philosophy, zoology, and religion, while ecocriticism is the literary contribution to environmental studies, a field that is also the province of history, anthropology, and geography (17). Zoocriticism is an alien term to most literary scholars, and the authors acknowledge that its intersection with postcolonial critique is comparatively thinner than the more established ecocriticism. Given zoocriticism's uneasy fit beneath ecocriticism's umbrella, Huggan and Tiffin divide their volume into "two largely self-sustaining parts" (19): "Part I: Postcolonialism and the Environment" and "Part II: Zoocriticism and the Postcolonial." The parallelism of these headings, or should I say the lack thereof, is confusing. Why not title the former section "Ecocriticism and the Postcolonial" or the latter section "Postcolonialism and the Animal?" Are the authors trying to draw our...

pdf