Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities : Postcolonial Approaches

This book examines current trends in the Environmental Humanities, focusing on how globalization and imperialism challenge approaches to environmental issues, and visiting narrative’s role in shaping ideas about problems like climate change, militarism, deforestation, toxicity, and agricultural resource management. It explores implications for defining a postcolonial approach to the EH in areas such as political ecology and environmental justice.　Spanning the globe, essays expand the geographical and historical contours of ecocriticism, providing new perspectives on how ecological change can be traced to globalization and a history of colonialism. A global, postcolonial, and comparative approach is essential to defining the field, enlightening issues surrounding alternative ecological futures.

This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental Humanities, focusing in particular on how the history of globalization and imperialism represents a special challenge to the representation of environmental issues. Essays in this path-breaking collection examine the role that narrative, visual, and aesthetic forms can play in drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about long-term and catastrophic environmental challenges such as climate change, militarism, deforestation, the pollution and management of the global commons, petrocapitalism, and the commodification of nature.

The volume presents a postcolonial approach to the environmental humanities, especially in conjunction with current thinking in areas such as political ecology and environmental justice. Spanning regions such as Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Australasia and the Pacific, as well as North America, the volume includes essays by founding figures in the field as well as new scholars, providing vital new interdisciplinary perspectives on: the politics of the earth; disaster, vulnerability, and resilience; political ecologies and environmental justice; world ecologies; and the Anthropocene. In engaging critical ecologies, the volume poses a postcolonial environmental humanities for the twenty-first century. At the heart of this is a conviction that a thoroughly global, postcolonial, and comparative approach is essential to defining the emergent field of the environmental humanities, and that this field has much to offer in understanding critical issues surrounding the creation of alternative ecological futures.