Postcolonial ecocriticism : literature, animals, environment

252 Pages·2010·2.14 MB·English

by  Graham Huggan

Postcolonial Ecocriticism
In Postcolonial Ecocriticism Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examine
relationships between humans, animals and the environment in post-
colonial literary texts. Divided into two parts that consider the post-
colonial first from an environmental and then a zoocritical perspective,
the book looks at:
(cid:1) narratives of development in postcolonial writing
(cid:1) entitlement and belonging in the pastoral mode
(cid:1) colonialist asset stripping and the Christian mission
(cid:1) the politics of eating and representations of cannibalism
(cid:1) animality and spirituality
(cid:1) sentimentality and anthropomorphism
(cid:1) the place of the human and the animal in a ‘posthuman’ world.
Making use of the work of authors as diverse as J.M. Coetzee, Joseph
Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Jamaica Kincaid and V.S. Naipaul, the authors
argue that human libe ration will never be fully achieved without chal-
lenging how human societies have constructed themselves in hierarchical
relation to other human and non-human communities, and without
imaginingnewways inwhichthese ecologicallyconnectedgroupings can
be creatively transformed.
GrahamHugganisChairofCommonwealthandPostcolonialLiteratures at
the University of Leeds.
Helen Tiffin was formerly Canada Research Chair in English and Post-
Colonial Studies at Queen’s University, Ontario, and is now Adjunct
Professor of Post-Colonial and Animal Studies at the University of New
England, Australia.

Postcolonial Ecocriticism
Literature, Animals, Environment
ffi
Graham Huggan and Helen Ti n
Firstpublished2010
byRoutledge
2ParkSquare,MiltonPark,Abingdon,OxonOX144RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
byRoutledge
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©2010GrahamHugganandHelenTiffin
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retrievalsystem,withoutpermissioninwritingfromthepublishers.
BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData
AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary
LibraryofCongressCataloginginPublicationData
Huggan,Graham,1958–
Postcolonialecocriticism/GrahamHugganandHelenTiffin.–1sted.
p.cm.
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
1.Commonwealthfiction(English)–Historyandcriticism.2.
Ecocriticism. 3. Human ecology in literature. 4. Animals in literature.
5.Human–animalrelationshipsinliterature.6.Coloniesinliterature.
7.Postcolonialisminliterature.I.Tiffin,Helen.II.Title.
PR9084.H842009
820.9–dc22
2009021329
ISBN 0-203-49817-8 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN13:978-0-415-34457-9(hbk)
ISBN13:978-0-415-34458-6(pbk)
ISBN13:978-0-203-49817-0(ebk)
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
PART I
Postcolonialism and the environment 25
1 Development 27
2 Entitlement 82
PART II
Zoocriticism and the postcolonial 133
Introduction 134

1 Ivory and elephants 141
2 Christianity, cannibalism and carnivory 162
3 Agency, sex and emotion 185
Postscript: After nature 203
Works cited 217
Index 236
Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks are due to friends and many former colleagues at Queen’s
University, Canada; to Steph Pfennigwerth for her dedicated and meticu-
lous research and to Jane McGennisken for her speed, good humour and
sage advice. Our grateful thanks to Ruth Blair and Kirsten Holst-Petersen
for their astute comments; and to Victoria Burrows and Elle Leane for
their support and encouragement. Thanks, finally, to the following:
Anthony Carrigan, Liz Deloughrey, Sabine Schlüter and Alan Ward short
passages of Part 1, section 1 are taken from an essay originally published
In Modern Fiction Statics: ‘“Greening” postcolonialism: Econitical Per-
spectives’. Our thanks to the publisher and editors of the journal for
allowing this material to be reprinted here.
Introduction
In April 2000, the American magazine Time published a commemorative
Earth Day issue. Featuring a beaming Bill Clinton in Botswana and,
more sinisterly, a series of double-page spreads advertising Ford Motor
Company’s commitment to the environment, the magazine duly joined
the millennial rallying cry to save the planet, issued on behalf of a
country that has done far less than one might reasonably expect to pro-
tect the global environment but far more than it could possibly have
hoped to ‘reinvent the imperial tradition for the twenty-first century’
(Lazarus 2006: 20) – a country that has actively and aggressively con-
tributed to what many now acknowledge to be the chronic endanger-
ment of the contemporary late-capitalist world.
In a very different vein, the same year also saw a re-issue of The
Unquiet Woods, the Indian historian Ramachandra Guha’s classic
account of the Chipko movement – a 1970s peasant revolt against com-
mercial forestry practices in the Northern Indian Himalayan region
which is often considered to be a paradigmatic example of those grass-
roots, often Third Wo rld-based, resistance movements that are some-
times bracketed under the capacious heading: the ‘environmentalism of
the poor’ (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997). Taking its cue from one of
the movement’s populist leaders, Sunderlal Bahaguna, Guha’s book sug-
gests that ‘the ecological crisis in Himalaya is not an isolated event [but]
has its roots in the [modern] materialistic civilization [that] makes man
thebutcherofEarth’(Bahaguna,quotedinGuha2000:179).Forallthat,
Guha’s aim is not to show how modernity per se has contributed to
ecological destruction in twentieth-century India – still less to suggest
that peasant movements like Chipko are doomed remnants of a super-
seded pre-modern era – but rather to outline some of the ways in which
state-planned industrialisation in postcolonial India, even while it claims
to practise one version or other of sustainable development, has only
succeeded in ‘pauperizing millions of people in the agrarian sector and
2 Introduction
diminishing the stock of plant, water and soil resources at a terrifying
rate’ (196).
Isthere any wayof reconcilingthe Northernenvironmentalisms of the
rich (always potentially vainglorious and hypocritical) and the Southern
environmentalisms of the poor (often genuinely heroic and authentic)? Is
there any way of narrowing the ecological gap between coloniser and
colonised, each of them locked into their seemingly incommensurable
worlds? The opposing terms seem at once necessary and overblown,
starkly distinct yet hopelessly entangled.1 After all, in their different
ways, Time magazine and Guha’s book are both arguing the need to
bring postcolonial and ecological issues together as a means of challen-
ging continuing imperialist modes of social and environmental dom-
inance; while both are suggesting, at the same time, that allegedly
egalitarian terms like ‘postcolonial’ and ‘ecological’ are eminently co-
optable for a variety of often far-from-egalitarian (national) state inter-
ests and (transnational) corporate-capitalist concerns.
How are we to read the burgeoning alliance between postcolonial and
environmentalstudies,theincreasingconvergenceofpostcolonialismand
ecocriticism, in such conflicted, even contradictory, contexts? In one
sense, the case for ‘green postcolonialism’ (Huggan and Tiffin 2007) or
‘postcolonial ecocriticism’ (Cilano and DeLoughrey 2007) is painfully
obvious.2 As Pablo Mukherjee (2006) puts it:
Surely, any field purporting to theorise the global conditions of
colonialism and imperialism (let us call it postcolonial studies)
cannot but consider the complex interplay of environmental cate-
goriessuchaswater,land,energy,habitat,migrationwithpoliticalor
cultural categories such as state, society, conflict, literature, theatre,
visual arts. Equal ly, any field purporting to attach interpretative
importance to environment (let us call it eco/environmental studies)
must be able to trace the social, historical and material co-ordinates
of categories such as forests, rivers, bio-regions and species.
(144)
In another sense, however, the coming together of postcolonial and eco/
environmental studies is hedged about with seemingly insurmountable
problems.For one thing, thetwo fields arenotoriouslydifficult to define,
not least by their own practitioners; and they are not necessarily united
even in their most basic interpretative methods or fundamental ideolo-
gical concerns. Internal divisions – e.g. those between broadly Marxist
and post-structuralist positions within postcolonial studies, or those
between environmental and animal-rights activism within eco/
Introduction 3
environmental studies – are constitutive of both fields, but these may
easily be glossed over in broad-based attempts to find similarities, e.g.
the commitment to social and environmental justice, or differences, e.g.
what Cilano and DeLoughrey (2007) call the ‘unproblematized division
between people (on the postcolonial side) and nature (on the ecocritical
one)’ (75). Large-scale distinctions based on the initially attractive view
that postcolonial studies and eco/environmental studies offer mutual
correctives to each other turn out on closer inspection to be perilous.
The easy assertion, for instance, that the postcolonial field is inherently
anthropocentric (human-centred) overlooks a long history of ecological
concern in postcolonial criticism; while any number of examples could
be mustered to fend off the counter-charge that eco/environmental stu-
dies privileges a white male western subject, or that it fails to factor
cultural difference into supposedly universal environmental and bioethi-
cal debates. Even more subtle discriminations such as Nixon’s or Buell’s
maynotholduptoclosercriticalscrutiny,whileMurphy’swell-intentioned
calls for diversity and inclusivity are insufficiently grounded, disguising
the Anglo-American biases that make their own critical pluralism possi-
ble –acommoncritique ofecocriticism(whichisperhaps moreinclusive
than some of its detractors imagine) that holds, too, for postcolonial
criticism (which is perhaps less inclusive than some of its advocates
attest).
One way out of this morass is to insist that the proper subject of
postcolonialism is colonialism, and to look accordingly for the colonial/
imperial underpinnings of environmental practices in both ‘colonising’
and ‘colonised’ societies of the present and the past. Here, postcolonial
ecocritics have frequently followed the lead of the influential British
environmentalhistoriansAlfredCrosbyandRichardGrove,whosework
reveals the historical e mbeddedness of ecology in the European imperial
enterprise, without necessarily endorsing the Eurocentrism lurking
behind these two authors’ own critical attitudes (Tiffin 2007). A further
irony is that the flexibility of Crosby’s term ecological imperialism –
which ranges in implication and intensity from the violent appropriation
of indigenous land to the ill-considered introduction of non-domestic
livestockandEuropeanagriculturalpractices–hastendedtocomeatthe
cost of its historical specificity, either blurring the boundaries between
very different forms of environmentalism or, in a move arguably char-
acteristic of postcolonial criticism, collapsing imperialism into an all-
purpose concept-metaphor that fails to distinguish between general
ideologies of domination and specific socio-historical effects.
One characteristically broad understanding of ecological imperialism
is that of the Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood (2001), who links