Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development
Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism
Contributions by Karen Thornber, Gang Yue, Cheng Li, Yanjun Liu, Tsutomu Takahashi, Jyotirmaya Tripathy, Pamod Nayar, Laura A. White, Inna Sukhenko, Salma Monani, Dora Alicia Ramírez, Aarti Madan, George B. Handley Edited by Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Vidya Sarveswaran
Not available to order
Publication date:
19 February 2014Length of book:
220 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739189092
Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development takes stock of cultural and environmental contexts in many different regions of the world by exploring literature and film. Artists and scholars working in the social ecology, environmental justice, and postcolonial arenas have long recognized that as soon as we tug on a thread of “ecodegradation,” we generally find it linked to some form of cultural oppression. The reverse is also often true. In the spirit of postcolonial ecocriticism, the studies collected by Scott Slovic, R. Swarnalatha, and Vidya Sarveswaran emphasize the impossibility of disentangling environmental and cultural problems.
While not all the authors explicitly invoke Karen Thornber’s term “ecoambiguity” or the concepts and terminology of postcolonial ecocriticism, their articles frequently bring to light various ironies. For example, the fact that Ukrainian environmental experience in the twenty-first century is defined by one of the world’s most infamous industrial disasters, the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, yet Ukrainian culture, like many throughout the world, actually cherishes a profound, even animistic, attachment to the wonders of nature. The repetition of this and other paradoxes in human cultural responses to the more-than-human world reinforces our sense of the congruities and idiosyncrasies of human culture. Every human culture, regardless of its condition of economic and industrial development, has produced its own version of “environmental literature and art”—but the nuances of this work reflect that culture’s precise social and geophysical circumstances. In various ways, these stories of community and development from across the planet converge and diverge, as told and explained by distinguished scholars, many of whom come from the cultures represented in these articles.
While not all the authors explicitly invoke Karen Thornber’s term “ecoambiguity” or the concepts and terminology of postcolonial ecocriticism, their articles frequently bring to light various ironies. For example, the fact that Ukrainian environmental experience in the twenty-first century is defined by one of the world’s most infamous industrial disasters, the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, yet Ukrainian culture, like many throughout the world, actually cherishes a profound, even animistic, attachment to the wonders of nature. The repetition of this and other paradoxes in human cultural responses to the more-than-human world reinforces our sense of the congruities and idiosyncrasies of human culture. Every human culture, regardless of its condition of economic and industrial development, has produced its own version of “environmental literature and art”—but the nuances of this work reflect that culture’s precise social and geophysical circumstances. In various ways, these stories of community and development from across the planet converge and diverge, as told and explained by distinguished scholars, many of whom come from the cultures represented in these articles.
This intriguing collection is like an odyssey into the hermeneutics of “ecoambiguity.” It sheds light on the problematic entanglements of ecodegradation and social repression with vivid local examples from the Global South. The essays here explore how ecoambiguity emerges from the contested intersectional sites of environmental and social justice. They reveal the contingencies of nature-culture interactions when pressing environmental problems are materially bound up with social distress and cultural oppression. Zeroing in on a particular local narrative, each essay unravels the spectral lines that disclose ecoambiguity as a historical and political process of inadvertent collisions between people and the environment. The co-extensivity of ecological devastation with poverty, pollution, domestic colonialism, and industrial development is so well expressed that the ambivalences of eco-deterioration immediately make sense.