Global and Postcolonial Ecologies

Green Letters
EDITORIAL BOARD
Editor John Parham, University of Worcester
Managing Editor Greg Garrard, Bath Spa University
Reviews Editor Terry Giford, University of Chichester/University of Alicante
Submissions Editor David Ingram, Brunel University
Editorial Advisors Laurence Coupe, Manchester Metropolitan University
Adeline Johns-Putra, University of Exeter
Wendy Wheeler, London Metropolitan University
GUEST EDITOR
Sharae Deckard, University College Dublin
EDITORIAL AND RESEARCH ASSISTANTS
Pippa Marland, University of Worcester
James Nouch
ADVISORY BOARD
Stacy Alaimo, University of Texas at Arlington
Michael P. Cohen, Southern Utah University
Sharae Deckard, University College Dublin
Leslie Van Gelder, Walden University
Ursula Heise, Stanford University
Adrian Ivakhiv, University of Vermont
Richard Kerridge, Bath Spa University
Robert Macfarlane, University of Cambridge
Sylvia Mayer, University of Bayreuth
Joseph W. Meeker, Emeritus Faculty, Union Institute and University
Kate Rigby, Monash University
Gillian Rudd, University of Liverpool
Louise Westling, University of Oregon
Green Letters is the journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UKI). It
is free to members, 7.50 to non-members. Library subscriptions, 45.
Journal design by Beth Cutter and Greg Garrard. Green Letters is published by the Artswork
PublishingLab with the kind support of the School of Humanities and Cultural Industries at Bath
Spa University.
Copyright is retained by all contributors. All other items are the copyright of ASLE-UKI.
ISSN: 1468 8417
Cover image from Chris Jordans Midway series, which can be found online at: www.chrisjordan.com
Copyright Chris Jordan, Courtesy of Kopeikin Gallery
CoN1vN1s
Editorial
Sharae Deckard
Articles
World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature
Michael Niblett
Greening the Zombie: Caribbean Gothic, World-Ecology, and Socio-
Ecological Degradation
Kerstin Olo
Planted over the past: Ideology and Ecology in Israels National Eco-
Imaginary
Hannah Boast
Post-NAFTA Ecologies: Mechanical Tortoises and Flower-Picking
Cholos in Salvador Plascencias Te People of Paper
George English Brooks
Gardens and Gastropods: Space and Form in Shani Mootoos Cereus
Blooms at Night
Kyle Bladow
Book Reviews
Greg Garrard, ed., 2012, Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural
Studies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan
David Borthwick
Anthony Nansen, 2011, Words of Re-enchantment: Writings on
Storytelling, Myth, and Ecological Desire, Stroud, Awen
Patrick Curry
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31
46
59
77
91
92
CoN1vN1s
Rob Nixon, 2011, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,
London, Harvard University Press
Laura Wright, 2010, Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the
Postcolonial Environment, London, University of Georgia Press
Sharae Deckard
Ken Hiltner, 2011, What Else is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and
the Environment, Ithica, Cornell University Press
Rodd A. Borlik, 2011, Ecocriticism and Early Modern Literature: Green
Pastures, Abingdon, Routledge
Terry Giord
Terry Giford, 2011, Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary
Nature Poetry, 2nd Edn, Nottingham, Critical, Cultural and
Communications Press
Matthew Jarvis
Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby, Eds, 2011, Ecocritical Teory: New
European Approaches, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press
Adeline Johns-Putra
Timothy Clark, 2011, Te Cambridge Introduction to Literature and
the Environment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Richard Kerridge
Richard Twine, 2010, Animals as Biotechnology: Ethics, Sustainability
and Critical Animal Studies, London, Earthscan
John Miller
MA Course Descriptions
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Eui 1ovi.i
5
In 2010, a giant ash cloud emanating from Icelands Eyja(allajokul volcano disrupted
air tramc and grounded planes all over Europe. During that period, as airports
flled with stranded passengers and travellers struggled to fnd alternative modes of
transport, as supermarket aisles were emptied of tropical produce, and fower-shops
stripped of blooms, the absurdity and fragility of global just-in-time delivery became
suddenly apparent, as did the chilling extremity of our petroleum dependency. Te
airborne event briefy paused the seemingly intangible, vast circulations of humans
and commodities throughout the world-economy, and in doing so, ofered a glimpse
not only of the ordinarily invisible capitalist world-system, but also its vulnerability
to the contingencies of an objective natural world. Furthermore, even as increasingly
desperate airlines begged for fight restrictions to be lifed, European citizens were
granted a partial vision of what a peak oil future might look like, when all planes were
grounded, when global commodities ceased to circulate, when consuming locally
was no longer an ethic but a necessity. Coupled with knowledge of another major
ecological event of that spring, the Gulf Oil spill, such a vision could either be eco-
dystopian, boding global eco-collapse as the inevitable result of unmitigated carbon
consumption and petrolic extraction, or it could herald alternative possibilities: a mass
transformation of the world-system not as a result of apocalypse, but by collective
decision. Travelers everywhere in that liminal period, scrambling onto ferries and
cross-continental trains that they never would have taken before, exclaimed to each
other, We might be doing this all the time in the future
Of course, when the fight restrictions were fnally removed, Europe was back
to business as usual, and the sense of absurdity and vulnerability faded, as did the
sense of alternative possibility. Nonetheless, the ash-cloud remains a salutary image
embodying the problem of visibility and imagination which extends to literature
and criticism: how to represent the seemingly unmappable, invisible complexity of
the world-economy and its efects on the planet, how to imagine alternatives to a
capitalist petro-modernity? Te paradox of visibility is accentuated by the fact that
those ecologies which endure the most violent degradation and transformation as the
result of the outsourcing of pollution and waste and aggressive resource extraction
are ofen the least visible in the world media. As Rob Nixon and Jennifer Wenzel have
both observed in diferent contexts, if the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf
was simultaneously spectacular and insidiously invisible in that the leak took place
far below the surface of the ocean, its full extent undetectable to the naked eye and
Snnnnv Dvcxnnu
6
capturable only through satellite surveillance, how much more horrifc are the 300 oil
spills per year in the Niger Delta, though they are covered up or fail to register in the
world media, and seem geographically remote, even invisible to television viewers,
newspaper readers, and Internet browsers in post-industrial core countries? Even
in the case of Deepwater Horizon, long afer emotive media images of oil-drenched
shores and choking birds have faded from view, the slow violence of the spill continues
unseen, as bioaccumulation throughout the Gulf produces species defects, deformed
embryos, shrimp without eyes, killifsh with cancerous lesions.
Or, to use another vivid example, we might consider the cover image of this issue,
a photograph taken from Chris Jordans Midway: Message from the Gyre series. At
frst the image appears abstract, an arbitrary collection of detritus scattered amongst
organic waste, until the viewer realizes that the bits of plastic are sheltered in the
spectral outline of an albatrosss body, its bleached skull and faded wings contrasting
the gaudy colours of the trash. Te Midway project was shot on the Midway Atoll, a
cluster of islands caught in the gyre of the Pacifc Trash Vortex. Located more than
2000 miles from the nearest continent, the islands seem to embody geographical
remoteness, even wilderness, and yet they are poisoned by human mass consumption
and industrial growth. Nesting albatross chicks are fed fatal amounts of pelagic
plastics by their parents, who mistake foating trash for food. In both its form and
content, therefore, the image stages the problem of apprehension: how to perceive that
which is geographically far removed, how to look beyond the distracting pleasures of
petroleum-reliant commodities to perceive the lethal impact of our consumption on
remote ecologies and non-human species, and how to render instances of seemingly
imperceptible and abstract environmental violence tangible through artistic testimony.
In their scale, temporality and expanse, the totalities of global capital and of the
world-ecology seem to pose impossible challenges to apprehension and representation,
producing, in Rob Nixons terms, a critical failure of geographical imagination
(2011: 240). Media disinformation, silence, scale, temporality, ethnocentrism,
anthropocentrism, and geographical distance are only some of the factors that
militate against the proper representation of environmental crisis and violence in its
diferentiated impact across the world-ecology. Yet it is precisely because the social
and environmental transformations produced within peripheries by the international
division of labour are starker that the socio-ecological crises of the world-ecology
might be more visible in peripheral and postcolonial literary forms, thus providing
an interpretative horizon. Tis special issue of Green Letters is dedicated to deepening
discussion of how postcolonial and global ecologies are represented in literature, and
in particular, to theorizing how aesthetics might encode both the economic world-
system and the world-ecology, applying the frameworks of postcolonial and world-
systems approaches to environmental literary criticism.
Tis focus on the postcolonial and global is partly intended as a corrective to the
exceptionalism and Anglo-centrism of North American and British ecocriticisms
tendency to privilege English and American national literatures. Over the last decade
Green Letters Volume 16
7
many prominent American ecocritics, from Lawrence Buell to Ursula Heise, have
rightly enjoined the broadening of the felds horizons into hemispheric, transnational
or global parameters (Buell 2005; Dimock and Buell 2007; Heise 2008). Te feld
of postcolonial studies is similarly undergoing reconfguration in response to the
epistemic gaps of previous decades. Te environmental turn in postcolonial studies
has been particularly critical of the felds failure to recognize less visible forms of
what Rob Nixon has termed slow environmental and structural violence, as opposed
to the immediacy of spectacular violence or political confict (2011: 10); to theorize
new forms of military, economic and ecological imperialism; or to make ecology
a proper object of study, despite the urgency of climate crisis, the unsustainability
of the extractive logic of the market in light of the planets fnite resources, and the
inextricability of social justice from environmental justice in the postcolonial world.
Te last four years have witnessed an explosion of postcolonial ecocritical publications,
including ground-breaking collections such as Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B.
Handleys Postcolonial Ecologies (2011) and Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunts Postcolonial
Green (2010), as well as seminal monographs such as Rob Nixons Slow Violence and
the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011, reviewed in this issue), Upamanyu Pablo
Mukherjees Postcolonial Environments (2010), and Graham Huggan and Helen Timns
Postcolonial Ecocriticism (2010).
While this outpouring is a positive confrmation of the felds consolidation,
the process of institutionalization has its perils. One pitfall which postcolonial
ecocriticism may encounter is the consecration of a handful of novelists (such as
Amitav Ghosh, Indra Sinha, Arundhati Roy, or Karen Yamaguchi) whose novels
seem to ft prevailing theoretical models in exemplary fashion, to the exclusion of
other forms, discourses and writers throughout the world, despite the sheer literary
diversity and abundance of texts open to interpretation. If not broadened into a
more wide-ranging and properly comparative tradition of criticism, this tendency
threatens to replicate the earlier phenomenon within postcolonial studies by which
the experimental aesthetics, pastiche and irony of certain texts from Anglophone sites
of empire such as Salman Rushdies Midnights Children received disproportionate
amounts of analysis and were catechistically read as emancipatory, due to their
seemingly close match with dominant poststructuralist theories. Neil Lazarus wryly
observes that a narrow postcolonial literary canon was formed which excluded realist
and materialist conceptual categories such as land and environment, nation and
nationalism, and histories of transitions and modes of productions, with the result
that there is in a strict sense only one author in the postcolonial literary canon. Tat
author is Salman Rushdie (2011: 22). In re-instituting the category of environment
as central to any reading of postcolonial or world literary texts, we should thus be
attentive to how selective reading practices and opportunistic critical interpretations
determine how certain fctions are institutionalized over others and fxed in approved
theoretical categories. A productive project for the future would be a study of the
feld of academic environmental criticism along the lines of Pascale Casanovas
Sharae Deckard
8
analysis of the dynamics of reception and competition in the world literary feld
(2005), examining the unequal relations through which some texts are consecrated
as properly green while others are unexamined. A central aim of this special issue is
to feature articles which choose to examine unconsecrated texts or which formulate
reading methodologies that open up new possibilities for comparison across regions
and for analysis of a greater diversity of texts and aesthetics.
In particular, given that the world-ecology is a thoroughly diferentiated physical
environment divided between zones of production in cores and peripheries, in which
peripheral environments endure intensifed resource extraction, waste outsourcing,
and environmental degradation, developing a critical vocabulary which can register
the systemic nature of combined and uneven development across the planet seems an
urgent task. Within this issue, several of the contributors adapt new methodologies
that have been productively formulated by comparative literature critics to take into
account literatures outside of the traditional linguistic domain of European Romance
languages. Tus, Franco Moretti has provocatively argued for a conceptualization of
world literature as neither a canon of masterworks, nor merely as a mode of reading,
but rather as literature of the capitalist world-system, which is simultaneously one,
and unequal; with a core, and a periphery (and a semi-periphery) that are bound
together in a relationship of growing inequality (2005: 149-50). Tis world-systemic
vocabulary opens up the possibility of comparison not only between postcolonies,
but between peripheries and semi-peripheries of the world-system, where the term
periphery signifes a structural position, not a value judgment or cultural hierarchy.
Similarly, Pascale Casanova has called for a restoration of the lost transnational
dimension of literature which understands literature as produced in a Braudelian
economy-world characterized by structural hierarchies caused by the unequal
distribution of resources in the world literary feld (2005: x). Moretti and Casanovas
emphasis on the complexity, inequality and unevenness of conditions within a
singular world-system makes their theories productive for the reading of literature of
the world-ecologydespite the conceptual faws of Casanovas Franco-centrism and
Morettis uni-directional conception of cultural fows between centre and periphery.
For other critics, the transnational turn has been driven by a desire to reimagine
literature beyond the conception of nation-ness as the sole origin of cultural
production. While commendable in their aspiration to shake of the blinkers of
nationalist parochialism, some transnational approaches are in danger of succumbing
to a transcendentalism that idealizes literature for its ability to defy historical and
geographical boundaries and to build communities across them. To erase the category
of the nation from literary studies altogether is to deny the extent to which only those
citizens who occupy the most privileged nation-states are able to aspire so comfortably
to cosmopolitan transcendence and to fail to recognize the role that nation-states
continue to play in the world-ecology, whether as bufers to the worst predations of
global capitalism, or conversely, as compradors to multinational corporations and
accomplices to the imposition of neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization.
Green Letters Volume 16
9
To repress not only the nation, but also capitalist modernity, is to fail to acknowledge
that the history of capital is itself, as Jason W. Moore has argued, environmental history
which must be understood in terms of the ecological regimes and revolutions which
have perpetrated mass environmental changes of peripheral and colonial ecologies in
order to extract raw materials and labour for the proft of the cores (2003a; 2003b).
Te violence attendant on ecological revolutions which radically reorganize forms
of labour, everyday practices, subjectivities, and bodily dispositions cannot help but
saturate literary representations of social experience, as Michael Niblett argues in
this issue: World literature will necessarily register, at some level, ecological regimes
and revolutions (even if only negatively), since these organize in fundamental ways
the material conditions, social modalities, and areas of experience upon which
literary form works. Tus, to Morettis proposed morphology of literary form as it
travels throughout the world-system should be added the question of ecology:
how aesthetics register particular social and ecological formations, the dialectical
unfolding of the social relation to a nature that is itself perpetually evolving (Harvey
2010: 185). Such analysis must move beyond the merely thematic to the formal, so
that literary texts are read not merely as mimetic representations of environmental
discourses, landscapes, or problems, but as environmentally embedded, structurally
marked at the level of imagery, style, and form by the ruptures and rifs of ecological
revolutions. Tis is to adapt Morettis argument for the reinvention of world literature
not as an object or canon, but as a method of understanding nodal points of the world-
ecology (2005: 54).
In his ground-breaking book, Postcolonial Environments, Pablo Mukherjee
usefully constructs an eco-materialist framework which opens up new possibilities
for analysis of non-mimetic representations and the ways in which textual aesthetics
might encode the specifc environments of the worlds historical conditions. In
particular, he reads unevenness in the deployment of non-mimetic and performative
cultural forms within literary fction such as Arundhati Roys as registering the uneven
penetration of capital into spatial and physical (environmental) spaces of postcolonial
societies (2010: 80). Te conceptual tools of eco-materialism combine Raymond
Williams cultural materialist formulation of the mixtures of emergent, dominant and
residual culture, the historical-geographical materialism advocated by David Harvey,
with an understanding of Trotskys theory of combined and uneven development as
an economic phenomenon with socio-ecological efects. Extending this approach
from postcolonial to world literatures more generally, an eco-materialist would not
seek to read world literature in terms of exotic diference - conceived in binary terms
as expressing the alterity of non-Euro-American ecologies - but rather, to interpret
literary particularity in relation to the diferentiated impact of combined and uneven
development upon local subjects and environments.
Tis raises the question of immanent vs. transcendent critique, whether eco-
materialist critics are reading for the geopolitical unconscious, as Adrian Ivakhiv calls
the latent, indirect manifestations of ecological crises which register in the warping and
Sharae Deckard
10
fssuring of form (2008: 98), or rather for an explicit politics of form: the self-conscious
transformation by authors of those very fssures into sources of literary innovation. A
possible diferentiation might be between what could be called world-ecological texts
which self-consciously aim to encapsulate the totality of the world-system, mapping
peripheries in relation to other centres and peripheries, as opposed to texts whose
content is wholly rooted in their regional, national or postcolonial specifcity, but
whose form nonetheless could be read as refecting their position within the world-
ecology, and which might thus be productively compared to other texts from countries
with homologous positions. Diferent aspects of ecological consciousness might
manifest on multiple textual levels, including genre, plot, narration, style, fgurative
language, and syntax.
In this issue, contributors examine a variety of categories of literary innovations in
genre and mode, including the emergence of non-Euro-American forms of pastoral
and national eco-imaginaries (as discussed by Hannah Boast), the invention of new
narrative structures modeled on indigenous life-forms (as discussed by Kyle Bladow),
the refraction of socio-ecological degradation in reinventions of the gothic (as
discussed by Kerstin Olof in her article on Caribbean gothic), and the production
of ecopoetic modes of spectral, magical, or critical irrealism (as discussed by Michael
Niblett and George English Brooks) and that is to name but a few. Another question
which this issues own selection of texts raises given the primary focus of its articles
on novels or long-form prose narratives is why the novel form seems to be privileged
within postcolonial and global environmental criticism, as opposed to poetry,
drama or other indigenous forms whose aesthetics might encode socio-ecological
conditions in distinctive ways. Nonetheless, a consistent theme in this issue is the
need for new modes of reading postcolonial and world literatures which are attentive
to both thematic matter and to the ideological content of form itself, thus avoiding
the tendencies of earlier waves of ecocriticism to privilege mimetic representation,
realist modes, and eco-centric themes, despite trenchant interventions from critics
such as Dana Phillips and the recent turn towards form advocated by critics as diverse
as Ursula Heise and Timothy Morton (Phillips 2003; Heise 2008; Morton 2007).
However, such a concentration on form as socio-ecological content, embedding
on the immanent level of the geopolitical unconscious or on the level of transcendent
critique the socio-ecological conditions in which the text is produced, is not intended
to displace focus from the politics of amliation or from the need for worldly social
agency outside of literature. Recalling Anne McClintocks critique of the fetishism of
form in postcolonial criticism, which invests formal categories of irony and bricolage
with the illusion of agency, Rob Nixon cautions against the similar formation in
postcolonial ecocriticism of a historically indiferent formalism that treats the study
of aesthetics as the literary scholars defnitive calling, (2011: 31) thereby displacing
social agency or political change onto anthropomorphized, idealized forms (2011:
32).
Furthermore, any worlding of environmental literary criticism ought to seek not
Green Letters Volume 16
11
only to generate an understanding of the political, cultural, and aesthetic dierences
between literary and critical approaches to the environment across multiple national
traditions, but also to detect structural homologies and similarities of concern,
particularly in those ways in which literatures respond to the uneven development
projects of global capital and their impact on local environments and subjects. Tese
structural homologies could be argued to register what Ernst Bloch has called the
synchronism of the nonsynchronous, (1977: 22) and proliferate on the level of both
content and theme, as when texts in South Asia, China, Africa or the Americas represent
or critique the detrimental impact of large-scale dam projects, mass fsheries, factory-
farming, oil extraction, strip-mining, forest-felling, waste outsourcing, and free-trade-
zone industrialization on local environments and indigenous peoples subjected to the
ecological regimes of neoliberalism.
To read for homologies is not to disavow the incommensurabilities of the
diferentiated impact of environmental crises and anthropogenic climate change on
local cultures and environments whether the desertifcation of the Sahara or the
inundation of the Sundarbans nor is it to abandon critical sensitivity to the dangers
of endorsing imperialistic or universalizing scientifc discourses which potentially
exclude local knowledge. However, it does represent an attempt to move beyond the
reproduction of the blurry fetish of the West which haunted so much of postcolonial
discourse, perversely overdetermining the critique of Eurocentrism without
acknowledging the internal socio-economic fssures and ecological contradictions
within Europe itself, and failing to account for the impact of industrializing economies
outside Euro-America, such as the role of China and India in the second scramble for
resources in Africa and South America. A properly worlded environmental criticism
must seek to do more than interpret texts as writing back to colonial metropoles or
as seeking to reverse Western practices: such critical emphases are clearly insumcient
to account for the ways in which texts might direct critique neither towards the West
nor towards former colonizers, but rather toward contemporary forms of ecological
imperialism and environmentally-degrading processes of capitalist development and
modernization, exerted both within the nation and from without by multinational
capital. Furthermore, it is to recognize the need for global narratives which can both
acknowledge and bridge incommensurabilities in order to narrate the complex and
diferentiated impact of global environmental crisis and to conceive of forms of
political resistance to it.
Te contributors to this issue make theoretical interventions that take up many of
these issues of representation and methodology. Tus, the frst two papers both attempt
to formulate world-ecological theories of literature which enable broader comparison
of texts at diferent points in the long-wave cycles of capitalisms ecological regimes
and which consider generic innovations and modes such as gothic and magical
realism in light of ecological rifs. In his article World-Economy, World-Ecology,
World Literature, Michael Niblett combines Jason W. Moores theory of capitalism
as world-ecology, Morettis world-systemic approach to literature, and Marxs theory
Sharae Deckard
12
of social metabolism to develop an ambitious model of comparativism that detects
the aesthetic imprint of ecological ruptures across a wide range of texts from China,
Nigeria, and the Caribbean. In particular, Niblett develops the Marxian concept of the
metabolic rif in light of Michael Lwys theory of critical irrealism and suggests that
the socio-ecological violence of metabolic rifs and ecological revolutions registers
in irrealist aesthetics. In Greening the Zombie: Caribbean Gothic, World-Ecology,
and Socio-Ecological Degradation, Kerstin Olof similarly works within a theoretical
framework developed from Moores theory of world-ecology, in order to argue for the
signifcance of the zombie as not only a fgure of capitalist monstrosity, but also as an
ecological fgure which records socio-ecological crisis and the alienation of human and
extra-human nature. Reading a range of literary texts and flms from the Caribbean
and the Americas through the lens of the eco-gothic, Olof traces the evolution of the
zombie from its origins in the context of plantation monocultures and slavery in the
Caribbean to its contemporary emergence as a signal of the exhaustion and global
crisis of neoliberal ecological regimes.
In Planted over the Past: Ideology and Ecology in Israels National Eco-Imaginary,
Hannah Boast emphasizes postcolonial, rather than global, approaches to what she
calls the national eco-imaginary of Israel/Palestine. Arguing against Heideggerian
eco-philosophies of dwelling, she posits the necessity of an environmental critical
approach to Israeli and Palestinian literature that is closely aligned with geography
and environmental history. Te comparative methodology she formulates demands
dialectical close reading of both discursive techniques and material histories of literary
environments. In particular, she explores the history of the Zionist national eco-
imaginary in relation to the production of a Judaized landscape in Israel/Palestine over
the twentieth century, arguing that texts by A.B. Yehoshua and Oz Shelach should be
read as not only ideologically signifcant, but as literal representations of the material
transformations of forests and arboriculture produced by apartheid and Zionist settler
policies. She concludes by proposing Raja Shehadeh as a writer whose work ofers
an alternative to nationalistic, possessive attitudes towards land, constructing a post-
national eco-imaginary which might enable trans-ethnic environmental movements.
In Post-NAFTA Ecologies: Mechanical Tortoises and Flower-Picking Cholos
in Salvador Plascencias Te People of Paper, George English Brooks conjoins
Chicano/a and postcolonial ecocritical approaches in order to read literature of the
Mexico-U.S. borderlands as inter-American literature in which the violent socio-
ecological impacts of neoliberalism are registered. Using Plascencias People of Paper
as an exemplary post-NAFTA novel of Greater Mexico, he argues that the novels
irrealist aesthetics and metafctional devices encode the new forms of migrant
labour, foriculture, environmental refugeeism, environmental degradation, and
criminal economies produced by neoliberal free trade policies, while at the same
time representing the strategies of resistance and representation which constitute the
northern environmentalism of the poor.
Finally, in Gardens and Gastropods: Space and Form in Shani Mootoos Cereus
Green Letters Volume 16
13
Blooms at Night, Kyle Bladow interweaves postcolonial and queer ecology approaches
to demonstrate how Mootoo queers the representation of green spaces and reimagines
gardens as heterotopias in order to subvert heteronormative and class hierarchies.
Furthermore, he reads the novels narrative form as modelled on a gastropod, whose
spiraling shells provide a metaphor for the analeptic structure of memory as it winds
back into the past. His reading of snail shells is thus reminiscent of douard Glissant
and Daniel Maximins refections on the signifcance of the conch shell for Caribbean
geopoetics. It is ftting that the issue should conclude with a return to the Caribbean
environment as a node of the world-ecology whose radical specifcity makes
particularly visible the violent transformations of ecologies under capitalism, since as
Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Rene Gosson and George Handley have argued, perhaps no
other region of the world has been so radically altered by mass movements of humans,
fora, and fauna throughout the history of slavery, indenture, forced migration, botanic
transplantation, and plantation (2005: 3).
Sharae Deckard is a Lecturer in World Literature at University College Dublin. Her
monograph, Paradise Discourse, Imperialism and Globalization: Exploiting Eden
was published with Routledge in 2010. Her research interests include world-systems
approaches to world literature, postcolonial environmental criticism and world-ecology.
She is currently co-editing a special issue of Te Journal of Postcolonial Writing on world
literature, and has multiple articles forthcoming on Lindsay Collen and the Indian
Ocean, Roberto Bolao and peripheral realism, Rana Dasgupta and the global ecogothic,
and storm ecologies in Caribbean literature.
AcxNow:vuovmvN1s
I would like to thank Chris Jordan for permission to use the cover image; John Parham
and the editorial board for their extensive help and patience; Pippa Marland for her
excellent editorial assistance; and Anthony Carrigan for his support in the initial
phase of conception.
Eu:1ons No1v
Te editorial board would like to thank Sharae for carefully editing an excellent issue
of Green Letters and James Nouch and Pippa Marland for their meticulous editorial
support. Te next issue of Green Letters (on new nature writing) will be the frst
published under a new arrangement with Taylor and Francis. As such, we would like
to acknowledge the considerable support which has been provided, since issue 10, by
the Artswork Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Bath Spa University.
Tis support has done much to improve the quality and appearance of the journal
and was ofered at a time when Green Letters needed such support urgently. We are
grateful to Greg Garrard, James Nouch, for his work on issues 13-16, and Beth Cutter,
Sharae Deckard
14
for her original re-design of the journal.
RvvvnvNcvs
Bloch, Ernst. 1977. Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics. Trans. M. Ritter. New
German Critique 11: 2238.
Buell, Lawrence. 2005. Te Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary
Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell.
Casanova, Pascale. 2005. Te World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, Rene Gosson and George B. Handley, eds. 2005 Caribbean Literature
and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. Charlotte: University of Virginia Press.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and George B. Handley, eds. 2011. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of
the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dimock, Wai-chee and Lawrence Buell. 2007. Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World
Literature. Princeton, NJ and Woodstock, UK: Princeton University Press.
Glissant, douard. 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Harvey, David. 2010. Enigma of Capital. London: Profle.
Huggan, Graham and Helen Timn. 2009. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals,
Environment. London: Routledge.
Heise, Ursula. 2008. Sense of Place, Sense of Planet: Environmental Imagination of the Global.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ivakhiv, Adrian. 2008.Stirring the Geopolitical Unconscious: Towards a Jamesonian
Ecocriticism in New Formations 64: 98-109.
Lazarus, Neil. 2011. Te Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lwy, Michael. 2007. Te Current of Critical Irrealism: A Moonlit Enchanted Night, in
Adventures in Realism, ed. Matthew Beaumont. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Maximin, Daniel. 2006. Les fruits du cyclone: Une gopotique de la Carabe. Paris: ditions du
Seuil.
Moore, Jason W. 2003a. Te Modern World-System as Environmental History? Ecology and the
Rise of Capitalism in Teory and Society 32: 307-377.
. 2003b. Capitalism as World Ecology: Braudel and Marx on Environmental History in
Organization and Environment 16 (4): 431-58.
Moretti, Franco. 2000. Conjectures on World Literature in New Lef Review 1 (January
February): 5468.
Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. London:
Harvard University Press.
Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. 2010. Postcolonial Environments. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. London: Harvard
University Press.
Phillips, Dana. 2003. Te Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Roos, Bonnie and Alex Hunt, eds. 2010. Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World
Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Wenzel, Jennifer. 2006. Petro-magical-realism: Towards a Political Ecology of Nigerian
Literature in Postcolonial Studies 9.4: 449-64.
Green Letters Volume 16
Av1i ciis
Woviu-Ecoomv, Woviu-Ecoiocv, Woviu Li1iv.1Uvi
M:cnnv: N:n:v11
In much of the renewed debate that has taken place around world literature over the
past decade or so arising in large part from a sense that globalization has thrown
the received disciplinary protocols and critical presuppositions of literary studies
into question it has become commonplace for critics sketching the genealogy of the
concept to reference its citation in Te Communist Manifesto.
1
Materialist scholars
have sought to analyse the correlation between Marx and Engels identifcation of the
self-expansionary logic of capital, which chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface
of the globe (1967: 83), and the emergence of a Weltliteratur. My conceptualization
of world literature will proceed on the basis of the fundamental importance of this
connection. However, I will approach it from the perspective of a particular dynamic
described in a passage directly preceding the Manifestos discussion of literary
production:
Te bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a
cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. [.
. .] All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily
being destroyed. Tey are dislodged by new industries [. . .] that no longer
work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest
zones; industries whose products are consumed not only at home, but in every
quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfed by the productions of
the country, we fnd new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products
of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion
and self-sumciency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-
dependence of nations. (1967: 83-84)
Here, the globalizing propensities of the capitalist world-system as outlined by Marx
and Engels in particular, its drive to appropriate raw materials from the remotest
zones and its destruction of local and national self-sumciency implies a radical
transformation of the global environment. Indeed, as Immanuel Wallerstein argues,
during the transition to capitalism in the long sixteenth century the rising demand
for food and fuel meant that [w]orld ecology was altered and in a way which, because
of the social organization of the emergent European world-economy, would primarily
15
16
beneft Europe (1974: 44). In other words, the tendency towards core-periphery
polarization inherent in the logic of capital entailed the unequal exchange not just of
economic surpluses but of ecological ones too.
Tis article explores how world literature, understood as the literature of the
capitalist world-system, registers the transformations in world ecology that have been
both cause and consequence of the transition to, and subsequent reorganizations of,
the capitalist world-economy. Its specifc focus is on fction from those peripheral
regions forcibly integrated into the world-system and subject to the violent imposition
of capitalist modes and structures as a result of colonization and/or imperialism, a
process that inevitably caused massive disruption to local ecosystems. I will consider
how ecological ruptures and the phenomenon of the metabolic rif (a concept
deployed by Marx to characterize the breaks in nutrient cycling between town and
country under capitalism), imprint themselves on the aesthetics of texts from China,
Nigeria, and the Caribbean. Underlying my approach will be a claim for a comparative
model of literary study that holds out the possibility of detecting likenesses (and
likenesses of the unlike) between peripheral literary forms as they respond to the same
yet diferentially articulated world-historical forces of capitalist modernity.
2
e Capitalist World-Ecology
Te epochal reorganization of world ecology that marked the rise of the capitalist
world-economy also signalled the emergence of what Jason Moore terms a capitalist
world-ecology (2003a: 323). Drawing on the work of world-systems analysts,
particularly Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi, Moore has made a compelling case for
understanding world-economy and world-ecology as representing distinct angles of
vision onto a singular world-historical process (2003b: 447). Te hyphenation of the
phrase world ecology is more than a simple terminological manoeuvre; it is designed,
writes Moore, to illuminate a substantive problematique:
Te distinctiveness of capitalism as world-ecology [. . .] is not found simply
in its large-scale transformations of nature. Rather, its distinctiveness might
be best located in the ways that it progressively deepens the world-historical
character of microlevel socio-ecologies in the interests of the ceaseless
accumulation of capital, which generates geometrically rising pressures for
ceaseless global expansion. [. . .] With the rise of capitalism, local societies were
not integrated only into a world capitalist system; more to the point, varied and
heretofore largely isolated local and regional socio-ecological relations were
incorporated into and at the same moment became constituting agents of
a capitalist world-ecology. Local socio-ecologies were at once transformed
by human labour power (itself a force of nature) and brought into sustained
dialogue with each other. [. . .] Hence, the hyphen becomes appropriate: We are
talking not necessarily about the ecology of the world (although this is in fact
the case today) but rather a world-ecology. (2003b: 447)
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Tus, to grasp capitalism as world-ecology is to grasp the way in which the production
of nature under capital becomes fundamentally world-historical, with the connections
between local socio-ecologies increasingly determined by the vectors of the market.
Under these conditions, as Marx noted in his analysis of capitals tendency to drive
beyond every spatial barrier, agriculture ceases to be self-sustaining: it no longer
fnds the natural conditions of its own production within itself, naturally arisen,
spontaneous, and ready to hand, but these exist as an independent industry separate
from it (1973: 527). Combining these insights with Justus von Liebigs study of soil
chemistry, Marx developed the concept of metabolic rif. Liebig, along with other
agricultural chemists and agronomists in Germany, Britain, France and the United
States, had warned of a soil crisis caused by the loss of soil nutrients [. . .] through
the export of food and fbre to the cities. Rather than being returned to the soil, as
in traditional agricultural production, these essential nutrients were being shipped
hundreds or even thousands of miles away and ended up as waste polluting the cities
(Foster and Clark, 2004: 188). Marx tied soil exhaustion squarely to the logic of capital
and its intensifcation of the division of labour between town and country, both within
regions and, increasingly, on a world-scale:
[L]arge landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever
decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial
population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces
conditions that provoke an irreparable rif in the interdependent process of
social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.
Te result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by
trade far beyond the bounds of a single country. (1981: 949)
As the town-country antagonism became progressively globalized, so too did the
metabolic rif. Tis was most evident in the context of colonialism, which created a
new and international division of labour involving the conversion of one part of the
globe into a chiefy agricultural feld of production for supplying the other part, which
remains a pre-eminently industrial feld (Marx, 1990: 579-80).
Te ecological contradictions engendered by the rif are inseparable from the
contradictions attendant upon the accumulation process. Expanding on the perspective
opened up by metabolic rif theory, Moore draws attention to the way capitalist regimes
of accumulation periodically exhaust the gamut of socio-ecological conditions the
very webs of life that originally sustained them (2011: 46). Capitalism, he argues,
is constituted through a succession of ecological regimes the latter signifying
those relatively durable patterns of class structure, technological innovation and the
development of productive forces, organizational forms and governance (formal and
informal) that have sustained and propelled successive phases of world accumulation
(2010: 392). If ecological regimes thus refers to the historically stabilized process
Michael Niblett
18
and conditions of extended accumulation, then ecological revolutions mark the
turbulent emergence of these provisionally stabilized processes and conditions (392).
Such revolutions tend to occur as a result of an accumulation crisis that is itself the
expression of a breakdown in the capacity of the dominant ecological regime to
maintain the conditions for the capitalization of surplus-value on an extended scale.
All great waves of capital accumulation, asserts Moore, have unfolded through
a greatly expanded ecological surplus, manifested in cheap food, cheap energy and
cheap inputs (2010: 392). Tese are cheap to the degree that they drive down the
system-wide organic composition of capital, that is, they help reduce production costs
and so counteract the falling rate of proft. Cheap food, moreover, reduces the value
of labour-power and consequently places a downward pressure on wages. Systemic
reorganizations of world-ecology, therefore, by producing an ecological surplus,
create the conditions for a revival in accumulation. However, the self-expansionary
logic of capital and its drive to realize ever larger amounts of surplus value compels the
intensifcation and extension of the exploitation of human and extra-human nature.
Tis results in rising capitalization as hitherto undercapitalized areas of nature are
subordinated to the law of value, while the demands placed on already capitalized
resources are ratcheted upwards. Te increasing strain this exerts on such resources
leads to their relative exhaustion, which in turn spurs on further capitalization in
order to maintain the rate of exploitation. Te upshot, as Moore puts it, is that the
rising capitalization of nature creates a world-historical situation of rising production
costs stemming from the degradation of the conditions of production. Rising socio-
ecological exhaustion and rising capitalization are two sides of the same coin (2010:
405; emphasis in original). Te ecological regime that liberated accumulation now
constrains it, and another ecological revolution is required to free up a new ecological
surplus. Each revolution, however, only resolves the contradictions of the previous
regime by positing them on an expanded scale (exemplifed by the progressive
widening of the metabolic rif).
Moore has identifed a number of such ecological regimes and revolutions across
the longue dure of historical capitalism (2000: 142-45). In this article, literary analysis
of texts will be linked to three signal episodes within these systemic cycles of ecological
transformation. Te frst is the colonization of the Caribbean and the maturation
of the plantation complex over the course of the long sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Te role of the profts from the New World sugar plantations in providing
capital to fnance Europes domestic industrialization is well-documented (Williams,
1944; Blackburn, 1997). But sugar and other plantation products such as cofee and
rum also constituted an ecological surplus insofar as they served as low cost, high-
energy food substitutes that helped cheapen the living costs of the labouring classes
in the core (Mintz, 1985). Te second episode is the ecological revolution integral
to the New Imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, itself
a reaction to the Great Depression of 1873-1896. Te worldwide scramble for cheap
inputs on the part of the imperialist powers led to the partition of Africa and the
Green Letters Volume 16
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integration of Indian and Chinese peasantries into the world-economy (Davis, 2001:
16). Te third focal point concerns the ecological transformations of the neoliberal
regime of accumulation, which emerged in the 1970s (Harvey, 2005). In what follows,
I will consider what kinds of aesthetic forms are generated in peripheral locations in
situations of ecological revolution, and how we might compare them.
World-Ecology, World Literature, and Irrealist Aesthetics
Discussing how a world-systems perspective can be marshalled as a means of
understanding the rise and fall of aesthetic forms, generic conventions, and the
varying centres of cultural consecration, Stephen Shapiro notes that, at its heart,
world-systems analysis relates political geography to economic history by mapping
long waves of economic expansion and contraction caused by the intrinsic falling
rate of proft generated by capitalist regimes of accumulation against the spatial
reorganization of commodity chains (2008: 35, 30). We have already seen how
Moores work builds on this model by rethinking it in terms of ecological regimes and
revolutions. Shapiro suggests that the value of a world-systems approach for new kinds
of socio-historical and literary study lies in how it enables comparison of not only
one subunit of the system to another at the same point in chronological time, but also
one subunit to another at the same location within the recurring rhythmic cycle. For
instance, he argues, nineteenth-century India might be reviewed alongside ffeenth-
century England as both regions express their entry into the global capitalist world
market through similar alterations in precapitalist caste, belief, and narrative systems
(303). By combining this comparativist methodology with Moores concept of world-
ecology, we can begin to think about tracking the aesthetic codifcation of ecological
revolutions in diferent areas of the globe at diferent points in time.
First, some further explanation is required as to why such revolutions and the
ecological regimes they give rise to will be mediated within literary production; and
why likenesses in this fctional mediation might be evident across literary traditions
emerging out of very diferent social contexts and cultural formations. Te key here
is the capitalist world-system itself, the globalizing propensities of which mean that it
comes to stand as a common reference point for all societies. But if capitalist modernity
must be grasped as a singular and simultaneous phenomenon, it is also one that is
everywhere heterogeneous and specifc its simultaneity is (as Fredric Jameson puts
it, borrowing Ernst Blochs formulation) the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous
(Jameson, 1991: 307; 2002: 12). In other words, for any location integrated into the
world-system, the shared experience of capitalist modernization provides a certain
baseline of universality, in Nicholas Browns phrase (2005: 2), even as this experience
is lived diferently across diferent locations.
Now, if we take the capitalist world-system as the interpretive horizon of world
literature (Brown, 2005: 1), then at some level this literature will bear the impress of
the structural totality of that world-system whether it grasps towards its mapping as
the condition of possibility for making some ultimate sense of social experience; or
Michael Niblett
20
whether it registers it negatively through its absence as a repressed yet fundamental
history. But this world-system, as we have seen, is not just a world-economy but also
a world-ecology. Hence, world literature is also the literature of the capitalist world-
ecology: this too is its interpretive horizon. To put it another way, world literature will
necessarily register ecological regimes and revolutions (again, even if only negatively)
since these organize in fundamental ways the material conditions, social modalities,
and areas of experience upon which literary form works. Tere are many texts for
which the registration of the world-ecology will occur only at the level of the political
unconscious; but there are others for which it will be a critically conscious act, one
involving the deliberate elaboration of a distinctive set of aesthetic forms.
Generally speaking, it could be argued that while Browns interpretive horizon
might constitute some distant and dimly perceived limit for literatures from the core,
marking a totality that, where it is not repressed, may be posited as unrepresentable
or mystifed as a static Absolute, for peripheral literatures the situation is somewhat
diferent. On the other side of the international division of labour this horizon is more
immediate and pressing, its historical character more apparent. I would argue, in
fact, that for literary production from those areas subject to imperialist intrusion and
forcible integration into the world-system, there will be a structural tendency towards
not just registering a particular ecological regime, but also marking in explicit fashion
albeit not necessarily at the level of content, but perhaps at the level of imagery,
style, or form the disjunctions and ruptures, the breaks and rifs, engendered by
ecological revolutions.
3
Tis is not to say that every text will consciously encode such
disjunctions. But given the particular violence entailed by ecological revolutions in the
peripheries, and the degree to which this violence saturates the social world being
inextricably bound up with the radical reorganization of everyday practices, forms
of labour, and bodily dispositions imposed by imperialism it seems reasonable to
suggest that representations of social experience will be compelled to engage in some
way with this history.
To come back to the question posed earlier, therefore, what specifc kinds of aesthetic
forms are generated in situations of ecological revolution in peripheral regions? Is it
possible to identify an aesthetics of the metabolic rif, the widening and deepening of
which is the corollary of the intensifcation of capitalist exploitation such revolutions
entail? Te Communist Manifesto again provides a useful way into thinking about these
issues. Here, in a well-known passage, Marx and Engels describe the revolutionary
transformations unleashed by capitalist modernization as a process in which all fxed,
fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions
are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that
is solid melts into air (1967: 83).
4
Ecological revolutions cleave to this modernizing
logic insofar as they represent in Moores terms the overturning of the historically
stabilized process and conditions of extended accumulation that constitute the
existing ecological regime, and signal the turbulent emergence of new processes and
conditions. In each revolution, therefore, the natural and social unities stabilized by
Green Letters Volume 16
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the regime are disaggregated and dissolved under pressure from the imperative for
new formations capable of driving forward the accumulation process.
Te signifcance of Moores theory for literary form lies in its implications for
realism. Realism, argues Jameson, requires a conviction as to the massive weight
and persistence of the present as such, and an aesthetic need to avoid recognition of
deep structural social change as such and of the deeper currents and contradictory
tendencies within the social order. [. . .] Realism can accommodate images of social
decadence and disintegration, [. . .] but not this quite diferent sense of the ontology of
the present as a swif-running stream (2007: 263). It is precisely this kind of ontology
of the present, however, that we have to do with in situations of ecological revolution,
suggesting that realism will be inadequate to them or at least that realist modes will
experience distortion and disruption when confronted by such situations.
If realism is problematic, therefore, what alternatives present themselves? In a very
general sense we might look to the concept of irrealism as defned by Michael Lwy.
Irrealism, writes Lwy, does not oppose realism. It describes the absence of realism
rather than an opposition to it (2007: 195). An irrealist literary work might include
elements of fantasy, the oneiric, and the surreal; it may well be founded on a logic
of the imagination, of the marvellous, of the mystery or the dream (194). Clearly, as
Lwy emphasizes, the concepts of realism and irrealism should be seen as, to some
extent, ideal-types in the Weberian sense: that is, as entirely coherent and pure
epistemological constructions; in contradistinction to empirical literary texts, which
tend to be an impure combination of both realism and irrealism (195). On the level
of a simple reversal, then, if realism falters when confronted by situations of ecological
revolution, irrealism might be expected to fourish. Equally, we might anticipate that
moments of the emergence or intensifcation of the metabolic rif will coincide with
the eruption into a text even if otherwise broadly realist of irrealist elements.
I will return to the issue of irrealism in a moment. First I want to consider
another point made by Jameson, this time in relation to generic discontinuities in
peripheral literatures. Jameson has argued that such discontinuities can be read as
mediating the violence entailed in the imperialist imposition of capitalist modes
and structures on non-metropolitan societies (2000: 334). Tis violence destroys
the pre-existing social unities that might have provided the unifed referent required
by realist representation. As we have seen, however, insofar as it is simultaneously
the expression of an ecological revolution, such violence also destroys pre-existing
natural unities. Tus, adapting Jameson, we might grasp the generic discontinuities
in peripheral literary works as mediating also the disruption caused to local socio-
ecologies and nutrient cycles by integration into a capitalist world-ecology or, equally,
by the intensifcation of the metabolic rif as a result of reorganizations of this world-
ecology in line with the demands of core areas.
Perhaps the clearest example of the kinds of generic discontinuities Jameson
speaks of is to be found in magic or marvellous realism (itself, of course, a form
of irrealism). In its juxtaposition of diferent narrative modalities magic realism
Michael Niblett
22
is frequently understood as registering the temporal dislocations and violent
juxtaposition of diferent modes of life engendered by imperial conquest.
5
To this
we might now add that it is just as likely to register ecosystemic ruptures. Indeed,
with specifc reference to the Caribbean and Latin America, magic realism could
be said to encode the smashing of indigenous, closed-cycle systems of subsistence
agriculture and the rapid expansion of the metabolic rif as large parts of the continent
were drawn into the fow system of the capitalist world-ecology.
6
Te imposition of
latifundia and plantation monocultures turned the region into an external nutrient
supply for the core, its ecological resources leached away via the export of sugar-cane,
cofee, rum, bananas, maize, and other commodities. Miguel Angel Asturiass Men of
Maize ofers a clear illustration of the representational signifcance of magic realism in
this context. Set in Guatemala, the novels combination of modern novelistic discourse
with narrative forms inspired by Mayan sacred texts mediates a clash between the
native Indian world and the forces of market capitalism that is simultaneously a clash
between diferent socio-ecologies: Te maizegrower sets fre to the brush and does for
the timber in a matter of hours. [. . .] Diferent if it was just to eat. Its to make money.
[. . .] Te maize impoverishes the earth and makes no one rich. [. . .] Sown to be eaten
it is the sacred sustenance of the men who were made of maize. Sown to make money
it means famine for the men who were made of maize (1988: 5-6).
In her 1971 article Novel and History, Plot and Plantation, Sylvia Wynter adapted
the distinction Asturias makes between sowing for proft and sowing for sustenance
into a structuring principle for her claim that the history of Caribbean society is
that of a dual relation between plantation and plot (99). Te latter represents an
autonomously-organized socio-ecology; it has been a key component in the struggles
of the enslaved and the peasantry for economic and cultural autonomy (Sheller, 2000:
44). By contrast, the plantation system the preeminent factor in the production of
nature in the Caribbean is inseparable from external domination, its systematic
extraction of surplus value and natural wealth fostering economic and environmental
underdevelopment. For Wynter, the rise of the capitalist world-economy, as both
cause and efect of the regions plantation-societies, marked a change of such world-
historical magnitude that we are all, without exception, still enchanted, imprisoned,
deformed and schizophrenic in its bewitched reality (95). In fact, she argues, history
in the plantation context is fction a fction written, dominated, controlled by forces
external to itself (95). In other words, where Caribbean peoples lack autonomous
control over the production of nature, and hence over the production of social reality,
this reality appears illusory or irreal since it is authored and manipulated by outside
powers.
As Wynters referencing of Asturias implies, a situation wherein reality is
experienced as enchanted and deformed will generate aesthetic responses marked by
the marvellous, the surreal, and the oneiric. But her analysis also raises a further point
of consideration with respect to distinguishing between the diferently specifc efects
of ecological revolutions in diferent regions, and accounting for the diferent kinds of
Green Letters Volume 16
23
aesthetic responses these might occasion. In speaking of the Caribbean it will be evident
that I have moved from emphasizing the impact of the ecological revolution entailed
in the imposition of cash-crop monocultures, to a more general point regarding the
irreal quality of a reality thoroughly imprinted by external forces. Now, recall that
in Moores thinking ecological revolutions not only dissolve pre-existing ecological
regimes, but also mark the transition to new processes of accumulation, which are
subsequently stabilized as the basis of a new regime. If irrealism comes to the fore in
those periods when all that is solid melts into air, would it not wane as an aesthetic
strategy once the emergent conditions have been stabilized and new socio-ecological
unities created? I think this might very well be the case in those peripheral regions (in
Europe, say, or in territories subject to informal colonialism) where the penetration
of capitalist modes and structures has occurred in less extreme or abrupt fashion than
in areas such as the Caribbean, where colonial conquest involved the near complete
destruction of pre-existing social formations, and where later reorganizations of the
world-ecology have continued to be imposed in a particularly savage manner. While
massive disruption to socio-ecologies occurs in both contexts, in the frst example an
ecological regime might be expected to emerge that at least generates the appearance
of stability and perhaps ofers some sense of autonomous control over the production
of nature; conversely, the extent and degree of the coercions entailed in the second
example ensure that no new socio-ecological unity can be properly stabilized and the
leaching away of resources remains a highly visible, violently disruptive afair. Hence,
because reality in the latter context will continue to be experienced as bewitched and
irreal, the irrealist current in the corresponding literary texts will not only fourish
during periods of ecological revolution, but is also likely to be a constant narrative
tendency.
7
Te theoretical writings and fctional practice of various other Caribbean authors
would seem to support this hypothesis. douard Glissant, for example, has argued
that the impact of imperialism on Martinique has produced a people whose relation
with its surroundings (what we would call its nature) is in discontinuous relation to
its accumulation of experiences (what we would call its culture) (1989: 61). Aesthetic
responses to this disjunction such as Vincent Placolys La vie et la mort de Marcel
Gonstran (1971), Glissants own 1975 novel Malemort, and Patrick Chamoiseaus
Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows (1986) have, in turn, made use of elements of the
schizophrenic, the delirious, and the fantastical. Or take the Guyanese writer Wilson
Harris, whose distinctly irrealist style is characterized by an aesthetics of surplus and
void that mirrors the impact of the metabolic rif. Te narrative oscillation in Harriss
work between linguistic / imagistic excess and dissolution fgures the economic-
ecological dynamic imposed on the Caribbean by the plantation regime, which
generates huge surpluses but, in leaching them away, consigns the mass of the people
to an experience of poverty.
Alternatively, consider Te Last English Plantation (1988) by Harriss fellow
Guyanese Janice Shinebourne. Set in the 1950s, the novel is broadly social realist in
Michael Niblett
24
style; nevertheless, it invokes an underlying sense of irreality in the protagonist Junes
experience of the social world. At one point, for example, she notices a large foreign
ship on the river, apparently transporting bauxite (89). Symptomatic of Guyanas
position as an overseas resource supply for foreign powers, the ship sets June thinking
about the absurd nature of an existence dominated by external forces. Tis in turn
leads her to speculate whether Guiana [was] really just a big prison camp run by the
British? If it was, all the freedom of the land that your eyes saw was just an illusion, a
dream (90). Trough this invocation of an illusory, irreal reality, therefore, the novel
registers the continued instability of the imposed ecological regime.
Further analysis is clearly required of the diferent ways in which irrealist narrative
components feature in the work of other Caribbean writers. For reasons of space,
however, and in order to substantiate the general claims made in this study, I want
instead to cast the comparative net further afeld. Te world-systems approach
adopted here, it was argued, opens the way to comparing analogous moments within
diferent systemic cycles of accumulation, making it possible to test the argument for
likenesses in the aesthetic codifcation of ecological revolutions on a wider historical
and geographical scale.
Ecological Revolutions across the World-System: China and Nigeria
Earlier I drew attention to the ecological revolution associated with the expansion of
imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In China, as Mike
Davis has shown, increasing intervention by the core capitalist powers had disastrous
socio-economic and ecological consequences for the countrys peasantries. Deeper
integration into the world-economy and rising dependency on cash-crop agriculture
lef many vulnerable to price fuctuations on the world market (Davis, 2001: 344).
Meanwhile, the new pressures placed on the land by intensifed cultivation heightened
the threat of drought and food, as did the disintegration of traditional safeguards due
to political changes stemming from the impact of foreign penetration (2001: 181-82,
290-91).
Te ongoing efects of this period of ecological revolution and of the regime it
imposed are discernible in the work of Mao Dun, whose trilogy of short stories from
the 1930s Spring Silkworms (1932), Autumn Harvest (1933), and Winter Ruin
(1933) documents the disintegration of Chinas rural economy under the combined
pressures of imperialism and landlordism. In Spring Silkworms, the peasant Old
Tung Pao ruminates on the impact of the foreign devils:
From the time foreign goods cambric, cloth, oil appeared in the market
town, from the time the foreign river boats increased on the canal, what he
produced brought a lower price in the market every day, while what he had to
buy became more and more expensive. Tat was why the property his father
lef him had shrunk until it fnally vanished completely; and now he was in
debt. (1956: 14)
Green Letters Volume 16
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Te inseparability of dependency and underdevelopment from the form of the
production of nature forced upon the countryside is illustrated by the fate of the
peasants. Locked into the cultivation of cash-crops, they are brought to the brink of
ruin and starvation not by any shortfall in the silkworm and rice harvests which
are bountiful but by a collapse in commodity prices. Maos stories thus invoke a
familiar pattern: on one side, the accumulation of an ecological surplus; on the other,
the increasing immiseration of the direct producers.
Signifcantly, Autumn Harvest shows how the creation of this surplus is dependent
upon the rising capitalization of nature. Te need for the peasants to sell to survive
compels the increasing exploitation of ecological resources, in this instance the village
stream used to irrigate the rice. Treadmills are placed on the bank to push the water
into the paddy felds (65). But in conjunction with a drought, the treadmills shrink
the stream to a trickle. Te only way to save the now ailing rice is to hire a foreign
pump from town (67), which will draw water from further upstream. We have
here, then, something like the dialectic Moore identifed wherein socio-ecological
exhaustion resulting from market-driven pressures to ratchet up the exploitation of
nature requires a further ecological revolution to overcome this barrier. Te increasing
mechanization of production, however, not only adds to the dependency and fnancial
strife of the peasantry (Old Tung Pao must borrow another eight dollars, at twenty
percent interest, in order to hire the pump), but also intensifes the despoliation of the
environment, deepening the metabolic rif.
But what interests me in particular is the way the arrival of the pump is also the
signal for the narrative to introduce an element of irrealism. Old Tung Pao, on watching
the pump in action, becomes convinced that some demon must be concealed in [its]
engine and the long snaky hose. Maybe it was the mud-fsh spirit that inhabited the
slimy pool in front of the villages Temple of Earth. Te water probably was the saliva
of the mud-fsh spirit; tonight the spirit might decide to suck it all back (69). As
Teodore Huters has observed, the pump is something profoundly alien to the old
man that embodies for him all the changes that have disabled his old familiarity with
the world (1993: 166). Te narrative irrealism generated by the juxtaposition of Old
Tung Paos mythic worldview with the modernity of the pump is underscored by his
perception of the water as saliva the mud-fsh will reclaim. Tis saliva, notes Huters, is
indisputably wet [. . .], but with a spectral wetness that lacks waters virtues of slaking
the thirst of either animal or plant. [Old Tung Pao], in other words, fears that the water
pumped in by Western technology is merely represented and that since it comes from
nothing, it can just as easily return there (166). Tus, the current of irrealism in the
text registers an encroaching sense of irrealism in Old Tung Paos lifeworld, one arising
from the way in which the ecological revolution represented by the pump begins to
reorganize and defamiliarize the existing socio-ecological unity.
As noted previously, the imperialist ecological revolution of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries that so impacted upon China had an equally signifcant if
Michael Niblett
26
diferently specifc efect on parts of Africa. Tus, we could compare the encoding of
this revolution in texts from, say, Nigeria. Chinua Achebes Arrow of God, for example,
has as one of its central motifs the disruption of the agricultural cycle in the villages of
Umuaro. Signifcantly, the climax of this storyline, which serves as a synecdoche for
the wider disruption caused by imperialist intrusion, is preceded by a strange dream
on the part of Ezeulu, the priest who is directly responsible for the delay in the yam
harvest. In the dream, Ezeulu discovers with alarm that his compound is deserted:
He ran into Matefs hut but all he saw were the ashes of a long-dead fre. He rushed
out and ran into Ugoyes hut calling her and her children but her hut was already
falling in and a few blades of green grass had sprouted on the thatch (1988: 547). Te
appearance of this irrealist passage in what is, broadly speaking, a realist novel, and
the sense evoked by the dream of a place leached of life, can be read as mediating the
impact of the metabolic rif engendered by the imposition of a cash-crop economy.
Or take Amos Tutuolas more broadly irrealist work Te Palm-Wine Drinkard
(1952). As Jennifer Wenzel has pointed out, the pressures of the centuries-long
international trade in palm products must [. . .] be read into the novel (2006: 452).
Indeed, the generic discontinuities generated by Tutuolas combination of novel
form and Yoruba narrative traditions can be interpreted (in line with the argument
advanced earlier) as registering the ruptures in local socio-ecologies and nutrient
cycles engendered by forcible integration into the capitalist world-ecology.
Neoliberalism: SAPping the Environment
In the concluding section of this paper, I want to move forward in time to an analogous
moment of ecological revolution from a diferent systemic cycle of accumulation.
Te emergence of neoliberalism in the early 1970s was a reaction to stagnation in
the global economy. In order to revive accumulation, a new imperialist ofensive was
unleashed against peripheral regions. Much of this was carried out under cover of the
IMF and the World Bank. Policies such as structural adjustment programmes (SAPs)
formed part of an ecological revolution that helped secure cheap inputs for the core
capitalist powers, with countries in the global South encouraged to substitute agro-
exports for staple foods as a means to service debt repayments (Patel and McMichael,
2009). Tis led to rising agro-industrialization and the increasing dispossession of
peasant farmers. Indeed, SAPs devastated rural smallholders by eliminating subsidies
and pushing them sink or swim into global commodity markets dominated by heavily
subsidized First World agribusiness (Davis, 2006: 153). Te result was a large increase
in rural to urban migration and the rapid expansion of Tird World cities, including
an explosion in slum dwellings.
Te impact of the neoliberal ecological revolution and its associated efects has been
keenly felt in Nigeria. In the mid-1980s, the Babangida military regime introduced its
own IMF-sanctioned SAP. Tis reform package led to a rise in extreme poverty from
28% in 1980 to 66% in 1996 (Davis, 2006: 156). Te encouragement given to agrarian
capitalism accelerated land grabbing and alienation in rural areas, with agribusiness
Green Letters Volume 16
27
concerns, agro-allied industries, and a coterie of wealthy individuals granted a host
of incentives, including governmental guarantee of access to land on highly generous
terms (Egwu, 1998: 10). As increasing numbers of dispossessed peasants lef the
countryside, urban areas such as Lagos grew at breakneck pace, despite the general
stagnation of the economy.
It is possible to read these pressures into a work such as Chris Abanis GraceLand
(2004). Following the fortunes of its protagonist Elvis Oke, Abanis novel is set in
Maroko, a slum neighbourhood in Lagos. Te text presents us with a Bildungsroman-
style narrative that fails to fulfl generic expectations: as Ashley Dawson puts it,
GraceLand represents an unequivocal failure of self-formation and socialization
(2009: 19-20). Tis formal disjuncture mediates the breaks in national development
associated with the impact of the neoliberal ecological revolution, including the
continuing disruption to nutrient cycles and exhaustion of natural resources attendant
upon an externally-oriented economy of extraction.
If Abanis novel registers the long-term efects of the imposed ecological regime via
its distortion of a realist formal model, it deploys a much more explicitly irrealist style
when representing the ecological revolution that gave rise to this regime. Part of the
book recounts an attempt by the authorities to demolish Maroko. Te narrative sets
this in 1983, on the eve of the imposition of the SAP, but the events also clearly allude
to the infamous bulldozing of the neighbourhood in 1990, when it was targeted by
the government as a prime site for the expansion of high-income residences (Davis,
2006: 101). By linking these dates, the text emphasizes that what we are witnessing
is the opening assault in the era of structural adjustment and its drive to reorganize
the spatio-economic and socio-ecological order. It is at this point that the narrative
shifs gear, introducing elements of the magical real. For example, at the moment the
settlement is razed, Elviss father, Sunday, is confronted by the ghost of his wife and
a spirit leopard; on being shot by a policeman as he attempts to attack a bulldozer,
Sunday leaps outside his body as the leopard and delivers a fatal blow to his aggressor
(287). Tus, the experience of ecological revolution in the periphery once more seems
to demand an irrealist aesthetic for its encoding.
It would be possible to go on and compare the fguration of the neoliberal ecological
revolution in works from other peripheral literatures. In each case, the particular
social confguration out of which a text emerges, as well as the cultural and literary
traditions upon which it draws, will impart an irreducible specifcity to its mediation
of the efects of the capitalist world-system. Te comparative model outlined here is
not meant to minimize or erase such specifcities. In order to establish the grounds
for comparison, I have ofered a preliminary sketch of how we might identify and
understand likenesses and likenesses of the unlike in the aesthetic encoding of
ecological revolutions and the metabolic rif in narratives from the peripheries. I have
suggested that, in general terms, an irrealist aesthetic, or at least the introduction
of irrealist narrative elements, is a predominant tendency. However, more detailed
analyses of the diferent forms this aesthetic can take are required in order to discern
Michael Niblett
28
the particular infection given to the registration of world-ecological forces in any
single social instance. In addition to the distinct pressures exerted in diferent historical
periods and geopolitical contexts, interesting contrasts are likely to be engendered by,
for example, the unique political-ecological complexes surrounding the production or
extraction of diferent resources (or, to put it another way, how and why might petro-
fction difer from, say, sugar-fction?). Te methodological framework advanced here
based on the proposition that if world literature is understood as the literature of
the capitalist world-system then it must also be understood as the literature of the
capitalist world-ecology provides a good starting point for comparative analysis and
opens up vistas for further investigation of this kind.
Michael Niblett is a Research Fellow at the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean
Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Te Caribbean Novel since
1945 (University Press of Mississippi, 2012) and co-editor of Perspectives on the
Other America: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture
(Rodopi, 2009). He has written a number of articles on Caribbean, postcolonial, and
World literature for journals such as Te Journal of Commonwealth Literature,
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. He is
also co-editor of a forthcoming special edition of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing,
entitled Postcolonial Studies and World Literature. Currently he is working on a
project funded by the Leverhulme Trust on Caribbean literature and the environment.
ENuNo1vs
I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust, which funded the research
project out of which this article emerged.
1. See, for example, Moretti (2000); Pizer (2000); Damrosch (2003); Saussy (2006); and Lawall
(2010).
2. Te term periphery is used here, of course, to signify a structural position within the
capitalist world-system; it in no way implies a civilizational hierarchy or value judgement.
3. It would be necessary, in extending this paper, to explore in more detail whether it is possible
to trace a relationship between the diferent forms of ecological revolution and the diferent
degrees and modes of disruption they entail, and the particular levels (content, imagery, form,
etc) at which this is registered.
4. Tis process, it should be emphasized, is not a one-of, total event but rather a ceaseless
dynamic characterized by unevenness and discontinuity.
5. Jameson himself, for instance, characterizes it along these lines (see Jameson, 1986: 311).
6. Te terms closed-cycle system and fow system are borrowed from M. Fischer-Kowalski and
H. Haberl (1993). Societies with closed-cycle systems continuously recycle their own nutrients,
whereas those with fow systems are dependent upon an external nutrient supply (416).
7. Cf. Benita Parry, whose distinction between peripheral regions I borrow from here: it seems
to me necessary that we observe the extent and degree of the coercions visited on those societies
that were seized for their natural and labour resources, or invaded for both material and political
Green Letters Volume 16
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reasons. Such determinants infected the singular accents of the modernisms in these locations,
registering a consciousness of a violent imperialism that we will not expect to fnd in Eastern
Europe or Portugal (2009: 29).
RvvvnvNcvs
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Achebe, Chinua. 1988[1964]. Arrow of God in Te African Trilogy. London: Picador.
Asturias, Miguel Angel. 1988[1949]. Men of Maize. London and New York: Verso.
Blackburn, Robin. 1997. Te Making of New World Slavery. London and New York: Verso.
Brown, Nicholas. 2005. Utopian Generations. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Damrosch, David. 2003. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Davis, Mike. 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nio Famines and the Making of the Tird
World. London and New York: Verso.
. 2006. Planet of Slums. London and New York: Verso.
Dun [Tun], Mao. 1956[1932]. Spring Silkworms in Spring Silkworms and Other Stories.
Trans. Sidney Shapiro. Peking: Foreign languages Press: 9-38.
. 1956[1933]. Autumn Harvest in Spring Silkworms and Other Stories, 39-73.
Egwu, Samuel G. 1998. Structural Adjustment, Agrarian Change, and Rural Ethnicity in Nigeria.
Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.
Fischer-Kowalski, M. and H. Haberl. 1993. Metabolism and Colonization in Innovation 6 (4):
415-42.
Foster, John Bellamy and Brett Clark. 2004. Ecological Imperialism: Te Curse of Capitalism
in Socialist Register: 186-201.
Glissant, douard. 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huters, Teodore. 1993. Ideologies of Realism in Modern China: Te Hard Imperatives
of Imported Teory in Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang (eds) Politics, Ideology, and Literary
Discourse in Modern China. Durham and London: Duke University Press: 147-73.
Jameson, Fredric. 1986. On Magic Realism in Film in Critical Inquiry 12 (2): 301-25.
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Verso.
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Hardt and Kathi Weeks (eds) Te Jameson Reader. Oxford: Blackwells: 65-88.
. 2002. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London and New York:
Verso.
. 2007. A Note on Literary Realism in Conclusion in Matthew Beaumont (ed) Adventures in
Realism. Oxford: Blackwell: 261-71.
Lawall, Sarah. 2010. Introduction: Reading World Literature in Sarah Lawall (ed) Reading
World Literature: Teory, History, Practice. Austen: University of Texas Press: 1-87.
Lwy, Michael. 2007. Te Current of Critical Irrealism in Matthew Beaumont (ed) Adventures
in Realism, 193-206.
Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin and New Lef Review.
. 1981. Capital. Vol. 3. Trans. David Fernbach. London: Penguin and New Lef Review.
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Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1967. Te Communist Manifesto. Trans. Samuel Moore.
London: Penguin.
Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: Te Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York:
Viking Penguin.
Moore, Jason W. 2000. Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rif in World-Historical
Perspective in Organization and Environment 13 (2): 123-57.
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Capitalism in Teory and Society 32: 307-377.
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February): 5468.
Parry, Benita. 2009. Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms in Ariel 40 (1): 27-55.
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(1): 9-35.
Pizer, John. 2000. Goethes World Literature Paradigm and Contemporary Cultural
Globalization in Comparative Literature 52 (3): 213-227.
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Hopkins University Press.
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Atlantic World-System. Pennsylvania: Te Pennsylvania State University Press.
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Green Letters Volume 16
Gviiic 1ui Zomvii: C.vivvi. Go1uic, Woviu-Ecoiocv, .u
Socio-Ecoiocic.i Dicv.u.1io
Kvns1:N O:ovv
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Te fgure of the zombie is an ideal fgure to think through the relations between
society and nature under capitalism from an eco-materialist perspective. Its origins
lie in the Haitian experience of slavery and the plantation economy; its subsequent
travels have transformed it into the fundamental symbol of alienation under
capitalism. As Steve Shaviro argues, zombies represent the human face of capitalist
monstrosity. Tis is precisely because they are the dregs of humanity: the zombie is
all that remains of human nature, or even simply of a human scale, in the immense
and unimaginably complex network economy (2002: 288). Building on Shaviros
claim, I want to suggest that while the zombie is indeed the human face of capitalist
monstrosity, it is also an ecological fgure, encoding the rif between humans and their
natural environment perpetrated by capitalism, an economic system that centrally
depends on the downgrading or devaluing of nature (Mukherjee 2010: 66). I will
argue that the zombies phenomenal longevity and resilience to cultural dislocations
is not merely due to an ofen racist sensationalism, but to the fact that, as Murphy
argues, the zombie is a fgure of mourning that incarnates [...] the fear of the frst
modern industrial workers who were stripped of human dignity (my emphasis, 2011:
48).
Te zombies continued relevance as a fgure that encodes alienation is rooted
in the Haitian experience of the emergence of modern capitalism, which depended
on, and was propelled by, the exploitation of the colonies. Since the exploitation of
both labour and lands was central to this process, the production of the alterity of
nature and the colonial subject were intimately intertwined on an ideological level.
Te de-humanization of colonial subjects as chattel (as in the Code noir of 1685) or
less advanced humans was inscribed into the imperialist dualism that placed human
beings outside nature and that reproduced the diference between human and non-
humans as inferiority (Mukherjee 2010: 55). Colonial subjects were thus routinely
seen as closer to nature, and opposed to the supposedly rational space of civilization.
Hence, in order to arrive at a decolonized conception of the subject, one must not
only re-conceptualize the relation between (imperial) self and (colonial) other, but
also between humans and nature-as-other. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George
Handley have emphasized, there exists a long history of environmental perspectives
in postcolonial writing that is ofen sidelined in mainstream accounts of ecocriticism
(2011: 9). In relation to the Gothic, it is important to note that the treatment of the fgure
of the zombie in many twentieth-century Caribbean novels has long pointed towards
the need to re-conceptualize the relation between humans and their environment as
32
central to the project of decolonization, anticipating the recent trend towards greening
the gothic as driven by ecocritics such as Tom Hillard. Te latter calls for an ecocritical
re-reading of ecophobic Gothic texts, arguing that the Gothic would provide a useful
lens for understanding the ways that many authorsregardless of when they are
writingrepresented fears and anxieties about the natural world (2009: 689). What a
reading of Caribbean novels highlights by contrast is that Hillard does not account for
the dialectical relation of racial/human and natural alterity, as ecocritical concerns are
here added on to the Gothic modes well-documented entanglement in discourses on
race, class and gender, but their interconnectedness and mutually constitutive relation
are lef unexplored.
1
In the frst section of this paper, I turn to the Marxist environmental historian
Jason W. Moore in order to theorise the zombie as a fgure that, due to its origins that
stem from the Caribbeans forced integration into the world economy, mediates and
encodes the metabolic rif produced by capitalism. Building on world-systems theory,
Moore seeks to transcend the Cartesian narrative of capitalism and the environment
(2010: 391) and to view capitalism as an ecological regime, as world-ecology. His
approach proves useful for an eco-materialist reading of the zombie, since Moore
understands (old and new) imperialisms as socio-ecological projects and processes
(2011b: 113). In contrast to deep ecological approaches, an ecocritical approach that
draws on an understanding of capitalism as an ecological regime allows us to address
the relation between human and ecological degradation, but does not necessarily
require a search for literal engagements with the extra-human world. Te production
of nature-society relations, as Moore reminds us, has been every bit as much about
factories as forests, stock exchanges, shopping centres, slums and suburban sprawls
as soil exhaustion and species extinction (2010: 392). Zombies have in recent years
been imagined as consumers, shoppers and monsters driven by hunger, but they
could never be imagined as small-scale independent farmers. Tis seemingly obvious
observation will lead us to the heart of the meaning of the zombie.
Moores understanding of capitalism as world-ecology enables us to read the
zombie in relation to the successive ecological regimes in capitalist development,
each of which has been the result of an agricultural revolution that drove down
food prices and hence production costs (2010: 389). From a materialist perspective
Stephen Shapiro has observed that the gothic mode emerges in clusters at specifc
moments in capitalist development, that gothic-efects tend to emerge as a cultural
marker of a regions initial appropriation by liberal economy and then reappear at
each turn of the screw in a new and altered form that responds to changes within
the system (2008: 32). In accordance with his observation, there are three key phases
in the zombies ecological history: its emergence and folk-tale existence within the
colonial plantation system; its appropriation by US writers and integration into the
US imaginary during the early twentieth century, as the new imperial power was
continuing to move outward to exploit natural resources outside its own terrain; and
its increased popularity towards the end of the twentieth century as a corollary of
Green Letters Volume 16
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the neoliberal phase that, as Moore puts it, has failed to generate the agro-ecological
conditions for renewed growth (2010: 390).
Te main concern of this paper is to contrast the employment of the fgure of
the zombie in imperialist texts and postcolonial Caribbean novels. Tis comparison
serves to highlight the ecological unconscious of the zombie in imperialist texts such
as W.B. Seabrooks Magic Island (1929) and the flm I walked with a Zombie (Tourneur,
1943). In contrast, in twentieth-century Caribbean novels such as Erna Brodbers Myal
(1988), the zombie is employed as a fgure that allows for the conscious critique of the
capitalist oikeios (the way in which nature and society relations are organized under
capitalism). While I refer to this aesthetic as eco-Gothic to bring out the way in which
it responds to the gothic-efects, it functions according to the logic of what Michael
Lwy (2010) calls critical irrealism in that the employment of the zombie cannot be
read as the eruption of a socio-ecological unconscious, but rather works as a critique
of the material and ideological legacy of capitalist colonialism.
2
Zombies, Sugar and the Metabolic Ri
Te Negroes, therefore, from the very start lived a life that was in its essence a
modern life. C.L.R. James (1938)
Te original Haitian zombie is quite diferent from that popularised in recent years by
Hollywood cinema: either a bodiless spirit or a soulless body, it is intimately linked
to vodou (a complex creolized religion that has been much reviled in the imperialist
imaginary). Te soulless body is raised from the grave or has had its soul stolen while
still alive (ofen through the administration of poison). It is controlled by a vodou
sorcerer and becomes a beast of burden, which his master exploits without mercy
(Mtraux 1972: 282). It does not bite and may awaken through eating salt. Te most
important diference between Hollywood and Haitian conceptions of zombies is that
Haitians do not fear zombies but may live in fear of being zombifed themselves
(Fernndez Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 2003: 129). Anthropologists trace the
concept of the zombie back to African spiritual belief systems (Ackermann and
Gauthier 1991), but one may here argue that there is also something radically new
and historically specifc to its emergence in the plantation context. As Shapiro argues,
gothic monsters may be nativist, folk traditions, but are actually new constructions
that register globalizing conditions in local-seeming idioms (32).
3
While it clearly
grows out of pre-existing belief systems, the experience of the middle passage and
plantation slavery has fundamentally shaped this new fgure. Further, while the
zombie is characterized by its docile behaviour and evokes images of mind control,
it also came to be linked to mass uprising through the popular rebel Jean Zombi,
who fought next to the revolutionary leader Dessalines, earned a reputation for
brutality and was transformed into a lwa (god or spirit) of the Petwo rite (Dayan
1998 36). Tis dimension of the zombie as a fgure of the vengeance of the oppressed
Kerstin Olo
34
and exploited masses remains relevant in later Western flmic adaptations. In the
Haitian context, the zombie - whether docile or rebellious - is a fgure whose roots
in the experience of brutal enslavement and exploitation are readily discernible. It
bears the marks of extreme human deprivation, as well as, arguably, those of extreme
ecological deprivation and of human alienation from the natural environment, now
re-shaped by colonial monocultures. Te exploited zombie labourer never works the
felds for himself and the fruits of his labour land on foreign tables. As Moore puts it:
the degradation of nature is the degradation of the worker, and occurs only through
the degradation of the worker under the law of value (Moore 2003: 321).
In order to understand the zombies travels, we need to look beyond the
sensationalism and must instead recall C.L.R. James assertion that the slaves life was
profoundly modern: they worked in a large-scale agricultural complex; the products
were shipped abroad; and their food and the cloth the slaves wore were imported
(1991: 392). Indeed, early modern plantation economies were amongst the most
technically and organizationally advanced in the capitalist world (Moore 2000: 128),
employing methods to guarantee emciency and proftability that were associated
more with industry than with agriculture - at least in the sixteenth century (Mintz
1986: 47). Many have argued that the sugar plantations were central to the emergence
of modern capitalism, but Moore adds that sugar (and silver) were ecologically central,
constitutive moments of an epochal reorganization of world ecology (Moore 2003:
309), enabling global divisions of labour. Te introduction of sugar monocultures
exhausted Caribbean soils, initiating cycles of unsustainable development. Capitalisms
confguration of the nature-society dialectic - the capitalist oikeios - is founded on a
metabolic rif in the relations between humans and the earth through severing the
relation between the mass of the population and the land (Moore 2000). Te uneven
global labour division is constitutive of this rif, which was more pronounced in the
Caribbean than elsewhere: the fora and fauna brought by the colonizers completely
transformed and altered the Caribbean eco-system, producing a radical rupture
with the ecological past. Te rupture of the capitalist oikeios was therefore not only
experienced frst on a grand-scale in the Caribbean, but also most dramatically. In
the context of the Caribbean, the chief legacies of colonialism and, in particular,
the plantation economy, have been the compromised deforested environments
(Paravisini-Gebert 2011: 100), the consequences of which are a loss of biodiversity,
soil erosion, fooding, aridifcation, climate change, and related signs of environmental
degradation. Sugar is one of the most detrimental forms of agriculture: it requires the
clearing of lands, depletes the soils, and destroys forests well beyond the plantation
because of its need for large quantities of frewood needed for furnaces in which the
cane juice would be boiled (Miller 2007: 79). Te transformation and exhaustion of
the environment in the colonies was a condition for capitalist expansion (Moore 2003:
309); capitalism is fuelled by its constant drive towards natural exhaustion, which
leads to further cycles of expansion and plunder. It is due to the zombies origins,
therefore, that it is a fgure that registers not only the workers alienation, but also the
Green Letters Volume 16
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metabolic rif that is not exceptional to the Caribbean.
Zombies in the US imperialist imaginary
Te zombies integration into US popular flm culture stems from the US occupation
of Haiti between 1915 and 1934, which produced some of the most infuential
zombie novels and flms of the twentieth century, including W.B. Seabrooks novel
Te Magic Island (1929), and flms such as White Zombie (Halperin 1932) and I
walked with a Zombie (Tourneur 1943). Within the imperialist imaginary, the zombie
came to express imperialist fears of racial and class others and the threat of mass
rebellion, while simultaneously functioning as an ideologically motivated rhetorical
device deployed to demonstrate and establish moral superiority of civilized colonial
authority over the barbarous slave (Ellis 2000: 208). Te zombie disturbs the fantasy
of the modern rational and autonomous individual for whom nature becomes mere
objectivity (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 6) and for whom clearing the land was a
mark of progress in contrast to the wilderness of the forests (Paravisini-Gebert 2011:
101). Te gothic, in Jerold Hogles defnition, usually takes place in an antiquated or
seemingly antiquated space in which the characters are haunted by the past (2002:
2); it is thus a mode of disruption, expressing ruptured experience of time and space.
In Te Magic Island, Haiti constitutes an archaic, primitive space that is alien to the
rational white US American. Te narrators frst impressions are revealing in this
respect: Only the jungle mountains remained, dark, mysterious; and from their slopes
came presently far out across the water the steady boom of the voodoo drums (1929:
4). While throughout the text, the narrator ofen happens upon the remnants of Haitis
colonial and revolutionary history as well as pre-capitalist agriculture, vodou and the
imagined primitive origins of mankind are here linked to a primal wilderness that is
dark and mysterious and that co-exists in the same space as the narrators modern
and rational frames of reference. Te narrators encounters with locals are rendered
in distinctly primitivist and racialising terms, as in the following example: It was as if
we had known each other always [...] as if I had suckled in infancy at her dark breasts,
had wandered far, and was now returning home (1929: 28).
4
Discourses on gender,
race and an imagined wilderness intersect in the production of this primitive space
governed by non-rational emotions and simultaneously attracting and repelling the
narrator. Te gothic here becomes the vehicle for a tale of transgression of boundaries
(which are ultimately upheld and reinforced by the narrative).
Te zombie is presented as archaic, pre-modern, but I want to argue that the
fgure sits uneasily with this temporal narrative of evolution. [Te zombie] upsets
everything, observes the narrator of Te Magic Island; by everything I meant the
natural fxed laws and processes on which all modern thought and actions are based
(100). Te rational, autonomous subject is momentarily destabilised by the fgure of the
zombie that de-naturalises the assumptions on which the fantasy of the autonomous
individual (who participates freely in the market and improves wild nature) is based.
While the book overall is steeped in racist-imperialist ideology and rehearses a version
Kerstin Olo
36
of the old imperial tale of a white colonizer accepted as king by the natives, the fgure
of the zombie also disturbs the ideology of the text.
One may here note the context in which the zombie is introduced in the text,
namely specifcally in relation to the production of sugar. In the case of Haiti, sugar
production had come to an end afer independence, but it was resumed on a large scale
during US occupation at the beginning of the twentieth century (Lundahl 2002: 90);
the American-owned Haitian-American Sugar Company (Hasco) began producing in
1918. In order to make way for its business venture, it cleared lands in the Cul-de-Sac
and Logne plains, marking the beginning of widespread deforestation and erosion
(Miles and Charles 2004: 123). It also displaced thousands of peasants, who had long
farmed the land on these fertile plains, whether independently or for elite landowners
through the demwatye (sharecropping) system (Ramsey 2011: 173-4). Te former
sharecroppers who had received 60-75% of the harvest were reduced to being salaried
day labourers and the company divested itself of any responsibility towards them by
subhiring through native gang bosses (Schmidt 1995: 178). Proft was generated only
eventually by under-paying the workers. When the US travel writer Seabrook spends
time in Haiti a decade later, he is told a story about a work gang of zombies working at
Hasco in 1918 by his rational friend Polynice:
At this very moment, in the moonlight, there are zombies working on this
island, less than two hours ride from my own habitation. [...] If you will ride
with me tomorrow night, yes, I will show you dead men working in the cane
felds. Close even to the cities, there are sometimes zombies. Perhaps you have
already heard of those that were at Hasco...
What about Hasco? I interrupted him, for in the whole of Haiti, Hasco
is perhaps the last name anybody would think of connecting with either
sorcery or superstition. Te word is American-commercial-synthetic, like
Nabisco, Delco, Socony. It stands for the Haitian-American sugar Company
- an immense factory plant, dominated by a huge chimney, with clanging
machinery, steam whistles, freight cars. It is like a chunk of Hoboken. It lies
in the eastern suburbs of Port-au-Prince, and beyond it stretch the cane felds
of the Cul-de-Sac. Hasco makes rum when the sugar market is of, pays low
wages, twenty or thirty cents a day, and gives steady work. It is modern big
business, and it sounds it, looks it, smells it. (Seabrook 1929: 94-95)
Te zombies in this description are not primitive, but inextricably tied to the symbol
of modernity, modern big business represented by Hasco, which the narrator here
seeks to tie frmly to the modern world known to the American reader. Tus, in
Polynices tale of zombies, the unevenly diferentiated landscape of labour and ecology
produced by capitalism takes centre stage, as he emphasizes the incongruity of the cane
felds in juxtaposition with the gleaming symbol of industrial modernity, Hasco. Tis
dwarves the workers and robs them of any illusion of autonomy or individuality. In
Green Letters Volume 16
37
contrast to the primitive sugar mill driven solely by zombie-power that is represented
in White Zombie (1932), the emphasis here lies on the large size and excessive noise
of modern big business. Te emphasis on size is signifcant in this context, as many
foreign operations in Haiti failed precisely because one of the major impediments to
the development of modern plantations was the long-standing division of land into
minuscule plots held by peasant freeholders (Schmidt, 1995: 179). Hasco was based
in the Cul-de-Sac plain, where large blocs of land could be leased (Gerald F Murray,
quoted by Ramsey, 2011: 333). In fact, for the most part, the high hopes for economic
exploitation by US business ventures failed to materialize, as Haiti only ofered cheap
labour but lacked natural resources (Schmidt 1995: 171). Tus, even within Seabrooks
text, the emergence of the zombie defes imperialist associations with the archaic and
primitive, and is revealed as a product of US-led capitalism.
Despite the fact that most of Seabrooks information seems to have been collected
in the bar of his hotel and was used as part of a sensationalist and titillating travel
account (Palmi 2002: 65), the texts account of the zombie labour gang retains a
powerful social critique of the proletarianization of the displaced Haitian peasant
(Ramsey 2011: 174), seemingly a local re-working of the zombie fgure at another
turn of the screw, as US agri-business invades Haiti. Te zombies powerfully speak
to the experience of these labourers forced into the capitalist free market: As Joseph
lined them up for registration, they still stared, vacant-eyed like cattle, and made no
reply when asked to give their names. [...] Tey were frightened, he said, by the din
and the smoke of the great factory (Seabrook 1929: 95). Te zombie, then, is not a
pre-modern fgure. As Palmi argues, far from representing a mistaken interpolation
of archaic fantasy into the script of agroindustrial labor relations, the image of the
zombie in this context springs from a reality deeply riven with a sense of moral crisis
unleashed by a predatory modernity (2002: 66). Robbed of the possibility of a more
direct access to the land through share-crop farming, they are now exploited workers
on a monoculture plantation run for proft rather than guaranteeing self-sumciency
and long-term sustenance, which is here experienced as a loss of a sense of reality. Even
though US writers were interested in the zombie as a fgure that helped to produce
Haitians as others, its socio-ecological unconscious is rooted in the experience of
degradation (of workers and environments) that is most pronounced under colonialist
regimes but characteristic of capitalism at large. Within Haiti, the fgure of the zombie
contains a critique of US agri-businesss penetration of the Haitian economy. Displaced
into the US context of the Depression era and mass unemployment, the alienated,
consciousless fgure also found a ready audience and arguably acquired a meaning
that went beyond the merely sensationalist-racist dimension.
In the two famous US zombie flms mentioned above - White Zombie and I walked
with a Zombie - the integral connection between the Caribbean cane felds, the sugar
industry, exploitation and the zombie is made visually explicit. Te former depicts
in detail a primitive old sugar mill that seems ill-suited to the modern plantation,
implicitly relegating exploitation to the colonial past. In the latter, there is a strong
Kerstin Olo
38
visual emphasis on the link between the production of natural environments in the
Caribbean and zombifcation. In a well-known sequence in which the Canadian
nurse Betsy leads the zombifed plantation owners wife Jessica to a vodou houmfort,
transgressing racialised cultural boundaries in the hopes of fnding a cure, the visual
emphasis lies on the cane felds that the two women must cross. Te two women do
not talk and the soundtrack is dominated by the wind, the rustling of the canes, and
more ominous diegetic sounds such as the of-screen blowing of a conch shell, and
the beating of a vodou drum that increases in volume. Te camera emphasizes the
cane stalks and the shadows they produce as the canes move disquietingly against
the moonlit sky, creating a decidedly gothic mood, which is further enhanced as the
camera suddenly cuts to a number of diferent shots of signs that mark their entry
into a primitive world (this includes a shot of a skull placed on the ground; a hanged
goat; and fnally, the zombie sentinel Carrefour). Troughout, Tourneurs camera style
subordinates human fgures to the decor and to patterns of light (Fujiwara 1998: 87),
which is enhanced by the billowing white clothing of the two actors that stands out
against the dark shadows and against the dark fgure of Carrefour (Paravisini-Gebert
1997: 44). Tere are several shots of the two female characters through the cane felds,
suggesting a loss of clear vision on the one hand, as well as creating a metaphorical
imprisonment. Tis sets in motion the symbolism of light/dark in relation to the
notion of reason. Further, it highlights the association of the enlightened subject with
the power to see in contrast to the colonial subjects habitual position as object of the
imperial gaze (Emery 2007: 2).
However, the scene does not only encapsulate imperialist fears of rebellion and
contagion; the natural environment here forms part of the threatening atmosphere.
Tis is not, however, the imagined nature or wilderness evoked by Seabrook and
associated with the non-American other. Rather, it is here the cane felds - primary
example of cultivated nature, of human-produced environments - that turn into a
threat. Given cane productions above-described unsustainability, this scene may be
read as the return of the ecological repressed. What is further interesting to note is that
while both flms invest their narrative energies in the zombifcation of a white female
character who, in the masculinist logic of patriarchal imperialism, symbolises the site
of contagion or possible transgression of the racialised binaries, in both flms, the
main confict is not between colonial other and imperial self as is sometimes argued,
but between the French and American bankers (White Zombie) and between a white
British West Indian plantation and sugar mill owner and his American half-brother (I
walked with a Zombie). Read alongside Shapiros argument that the Gothic mode may
be read as a representational response by one core society to fears of losing place to
another during times of capitalist phase transition in the world-system (Shapiro 2008:
35), one might here suggest that these flms stage, in displaced form, the struggle for
control over exploitable regions at a time when the US was emerging as a major new
imperial power.
Green Letters Volume 16
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Eco-gothic Aesthetics in Caribbean Magical Realist Fiction
Te history of colonisation is the process of mans general zombifcation. It is
also the quest for a revitalising salt capable of restoring to man the use of his
imagination and his culture. Ren Dpestre
5
Caribbean writing has from an early stage in its history explored the relationship
between colonialism and the environment (Paravisini-Gebert 2011: 100). Landscape,
re-made by colonialism, becomes a monument in Caribbean writing, as Glissant has
put it, adding that the language of the landscape becomes a shaping force (1989:
11; 145). In other words, the extra-human environment is not perceived as static and
separate from human society. Instead, it is represented as shaped by, and shaping,
human history. Given that historically, the form of the novel has contributed to shaping
modern conceptions of the nature-society dualism, many Caribbean writers eforts to
decolonise the form of the novel and its conception of character rest on a rejection
of this underlying dualism in favour of an understanding of human-nature relations
as dialectic. Te ecological unconscious that is inherent in all zombie fgures is thus
consciously addressed in relation to human forms of alterity. In other words, the link
between imperial-patriarchal othering and the exploitation of nature is made explicit
through the aesthetic use of the zombie. As examples, one might here cite Wilson
Harriss Palace of the Peacock (1960), Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Franktiennes
Dzaf (1975), Simone Schwarz-Barts Ti Jean LHorizon (1979), Erna Brodbers Myal
(1988) and more recently, Malas hierbas (2010) by Pedro Cabiya. Zombifed characters
throw into doubt one of the key cornerstones of traditional realist novelistic writing,
since they are not typical characters; they are not individuals in that they lack its
principal characteristics. In these novels, they throw into doubt the very concept of the
autonomous, self-determining individual dominating over his others and the natural
realm.
Within these texts, the gothic mode is ofen subsumed by, or is employed
alongside, magical realism, which is, like the gothic, a style of disruption growing out
of capitalist unevenness subjectively experienced as ruptures in time. Despite its only
passing mention of zombies, it is here useful to turn to Alejo Carpentiers Haitian
novel, Te Kingdom of Tis World (1957 [originally published in 1949]), which sheds
light on this transition from gothic to magical realist. Infuenced by Seabrooks Te
Magic Island, it is a threshold text that sits uncomfortably and challengingly between a
primitivist-gothic perspective on Haiti (marked by exoticism and ecophobia), and one
that would seek to decolonise and reinterpret historical and fctional representation of
a key episode in world history, the Haitian Revolution. At moments, the narrative tone
is distinctly gothic, as for instance in the chapter that narrates the poisoning campaign
led by the maroon and houngan (a vodou priest) Makandal from the ecophobic
perspective of the colonists: Te poison crawled across the Plaine du Nord, invading
pastures and stables. Nobody knew how it found its way into the grass and the alfalfa,
Kerstin Olo
40
got mixed in with the bales of hay, climbed into the mangers. [...] Soon, to the general
horror, it became known that the poison had got into the houses. [...] Te sinister
hammering of comns could be heard at all hours (33; 34). Te threat perceived by the
colonists is both natural and human, as Makandals superior knowledge of the plants
and fungi of the island causes the death of those animals naturalized in the Caribbean,
as well as of the colonists themselves. It is also from the perspective of the colonists
that zombies are evoked when the threat of Makandal has been averted: Others stated
that the houngan had got away on a schooner, and was operating in a region in Jacmel,
where many men who had died tilled the land as long as they were kept from tasting
salt (40-1). Te zombies in this narrative form part of an exoticised realm inhabited
by Makandal. However, the gothic modes association with the colonists perspective
is not consistent within the novel: the description of the houngan Boukmans famous
vodou ceremony that, over three decades later, led to the outbreak of the revolution
relies heavily on imperialist historiography (Antoine Dalmas Histoire de la rvolution
de Saint-Domingue (1814)), producing a scene that would not be out of place within
an imperialist gothic novel. Indeed, as Paravisini-Gebert argues, Carpentier is not
unwilling to fetishise certain aspects of the vodou faith (2004: 118).
Simultaneously, however, the reader is at times ofered a communal Afro-
Caribbean perspective that has its roots in Afro-Caribbean religious traditions (in
which the extra-human world is infused with spirit), and suggests a diferent relation
to the extra-human environment. Confronted with Makandals disappearance,
they all knew that the green lizard, the night moth, the strange dog, the incredible
gannet, were nothing but disguises. As he had the power to take the shape of hoofed
animal, bird, fsh, or insect, Makandal continually visited the plantations of the
Plaine to watch over his faithful and fnd out if they still had faith in his return (41).
Makandals cyclical metamorphoses symbolize a more dynamic relation with the
environment, which contrasts with the emphasis in the second half of the novel on
the ecological legacy of the plantation system (the result of European colonialism)
and of the wreckage lef in the wake of the Revolution (Paravisini-Gebert 2005: 189).
Overall, the narrative upholds racialised binaries and represents Afro-Caribbeans as
more virile and culturally closer to extra-human nature in contrast to the efeminate
Europeans whose culture is seen as decadent and lifeless, and thus still demonstrates
a close amliation to primitivism. However, while it is in many ways unable to extricate
itself from imperialist discourses on race and gender, as the above quote suggests it
also gestures towards a diferent way of conceptualizing the relation between extra-
human environment and humans, as the dualistic distinction between society and
nature is momentarily overcome.
In Erna Brodbers more recent novel Myal set in Jamaica, the zombie is a product
of spirit-thef and becomes the central symbol and symptom of the impact of
colonialist capitalism on individuals and the nature-society dialectic. Myal does not
have a protagonist in the traditional sense, but rather constructs a more polycentric
narrative through doubling and narrative strands that mirror each other. Zombifed
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Ella functions as the site where the many forms of spirit thievery converge [...]:
the violence of colonization, the neo-colonial violence of the United States and her
American husband Selwyn Langley, the racial and sexual domination of her marriage
and her marginalisation by her peers because of her lighter skin colour (Puri 2004:
149). Ecological violence is emphasized throughout the novel: as a school girl, Ella
uncritically recites two famous poems by the pro-imperial author Rudyard Kipling,
Big Steamers (1911) and Te White Mans Burden (1899). Extracts of the two poems
are ofered at the beginning of chapter two: the frst celebrates the globalised food
trade (We [the steamers] are going to fetch you your bread and your butter/Your
beef, pork, and mutton, apples and cheese (1988: 5)), the second refers to the new
caught sullen peoples/ half devil and half child who are the white mans metaphoric
burden (1988: 6). Together, they thus link the expansion of the metabolic rif through
capitalist globalization with the othering of imperial subjects, joining the outward drive
of capitalist expansion with the production of an uneven global labour distribution.
Colonialist education transformed Ella into a zombie alienated from local reality and
an unthinking voice of imperialist propaganda. Te adult Ella experiences another
version of symbolic violence as her husband transforms her childhood memories
into an exoticist coon show, through which Brodber is able to highlight the relation
between racial and natural alterity as produced in neo-colonial discourse. Te Grove
town of Selwyns play, we are told with irony, had to be the most fruitful place in the
whole world and one which respected no season (1988: 83); it ofers an image of an
exoticised and commodifed nature produced for tourists taste, functioning merely
as the backdrop for the blond heroine with fowing hair. Te disrupted relation to the
extra-human world thus forms part of this zombifcation, which also becomes clear
in Reverend Simpsons description of duppies, zombies, living dead capable only of
receiving orders as people robbed of their knowledge of their original and natural
world (1988: 107).
Simpsons understanding of zombifcation sheds light on the frst chapter, which
ofers a description of a myal ritual to cure Ella, in which the narrative voice shifs
between extra-human and human perspectives as the landscape is infused with
spirituality. Te traditional healer Mass Cyrus absorbs [Ellas] pain and redistributes
it outward in the form of bitter vibrations to all the living things in his grove, who
then transform it into positive energy (Kortenaar 2011: 148). Tis transformation
and transmission of energies is also distinctly violent as the trembling of the grove
becomes a lightning storm that destroys animal and human lives outside of the grove
(1988: 4), metaphorically evoking the labour unrests of 1919, a year that marked
the beginning of wide-spread disturbances (Puri 2004: 163). Within the realm of
the novel, this eventually leads to Ellas de-zombifcation, as she turns into a teacher
who transmits subversive reading practices to her students. In Myal as in many other
postcolonial Caribbean texts, de-zombifcation lies within the realm of possibility and
requires a conscious engagement with the legacy of colonialist capitalism, including
its conceptions of extra-human nature. Signifcantly, the zombie is not a positive fgure
Kerstin Olo
42
in itself, but it is a tool for analysis. It is not enough for the zombies to merely disturb
the system; they yearn to become dezombifed. Tis contrasts with the postmodernist-
posthumanist perspective ofered by Lauro and Embrys A Zombie Manifesto (2008),
in which the zombii demonstrates the meaning of posthuman as a fgure that
disturbs and disrupts but whose subject position is nullifed (2008: 95). Te vision
of a posthuman subject that implicitly underlies Myal is very diferent: it valorises
a reconfgured subject that is conceived relationally, not a consciousless agent that
disturbs the system; it celebrates not the swarm mechanism, but a reconstituted sense
of community that manifests itself through the relational construction of characters
and plot.
To conclude, reducing the zombie to sensationalism - even in its imperialist
incarnations - does not do justice to this fgure. Te zombie is a Haitian invention
testifying to, and containing within it, the memory of the frst experience of industrial
exploitation, magnifed by the extremely brutal and dehumanizing context of slavery
that reduced humans to chattel, as well as the experience of the ecological dimension of
modernity, intensifed by the plantations. While the zombie was deracinated from its
original context and emptied of its spiritual dimension, while it has changed dramatically
over time and through its displacements (from disembodied soul, to soulless, slow-
moving body, to revolutionary fghter, to cannibalistic, fast-moving and ever-hungry
monster in Hollywood cinema of neoliberal times), it continues to be a fgure that
encodes the degradation of workers and land under capitalism. Phantasmagoric tales
and flms emerge and become popular as they function as critical indicators of the
increasing capitalization of human life. Te ecological unconscious of the form of the
zombie tale - the zombies basic alienation from his environment, including human
beings - continues to erupt and disturb. It is not coincidental that in George Romeros
flms, what causes the dead to walk is a man-made human ecological disaster and
that the perhaps most iconic scene is that of hordes of zombies senselessly walking
across felds. Zombies could never be farmers, gardeners or planters, professions that
would have to be founded on a long-term relation to the land. By the late twentieth
century, zombie movies had increased immensely in popularity, and the zombie
had become a mindless hunter driven by hunger. Tis paper argued that Caribbean
novelists have shown for some time that the zombie is a key fgure for thinking about
aesthetics in relation to world-ecology, since it encoded radical transformations and
subsequent degradations or exhaustions of extra-human environments and human
labour. Further, it is a key fgure through which the legacy of colonialist capitalism is
addressed and the capitalist oikeios critiqued. Te zombie is, afer all, not only a fgure
of disenfranchisement but also of mass rebellion and political unrest. Within Haiti and
Haitian literature, the twentieth-century zombie continues to ofer a ftting vehicle for
intellectuals interested in amrming their commitment to Haitis popular culture as
well as an ideal metaphor through which to condemn Haitis social and political ills
(Glover 2011: 58). While Kaimana Glover is right to claim that the zombie is frst and
foremost an expression of Haitianness (59), the experience encapsulated by the fgure
Green Letters Volume 16
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of the zombie has wider ramifcations, transforming it into a symbol that, from the
start, has had global signifcance.
Kerstin Olo is a Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Durham,
where she teaches classes on the cultures of the Hispanic Caribbean and, more broadly,
Latin American literary and visual art. Before moving to Durham, she taught classes
at the Universities of Toronto and Warwick. She is the co-editor of Perspectives on the
other America: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture
(Rodopi, 2009). She has published articles on Caribbean, Central American and
Mexican literature. Her research interests lie in the novel form and the articulation of
selfood; the gothic mode and the fgure of the zombie; postcolonial studies; ecocriticism/
eco-materialism; feminism and gender studies; and world literature. She is currently
working on completing her frst monograph, provisionally entitled Refashioning the Self:
Modernity, the Individual and the Caribbean Novel.
ENuNo1vs
1. Tis is surprising given that his chosen example is Edgar Allan Poes Te Raven. Te racial
politics of this poem have been explored at length in other critical works (for instance J. Gerald
Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg (Eds). 2001. Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race. Oxford:
Oxford University Press).
2. As Lwy puts it, the word critique should in this context not be understood as relating to a
rational argument, a systematic opposition, or an explicit discourse (2010: 214).
3. Similarly, as Joan Dayan reports, the lwa (gods or spirits) most ofen invoked in vodou
ceremonies today do not go back to Africa; rather, they were responses to the institution of
slavery (1998: 36). It is here also appropriate to recall Michael Taussigs observation that magic
and rite can strengthen the critical consciousness that a devastatingly hostile reality forces on
the people laboring in the plantations and mines. [...] Yet it can be made aware of its creative
power instead of ascribing this power to its products. Social progress and critical thought are
bound to this dialectical task of defetishization (1983: 232).
4. Mary Renda makes the rhetorical link between this primitivist vision and US paternalism
explicit, arguing that if Haiti is discursively associated with childhood, the US by contrast
provides a useful adult presence (2001: 249).
5. Quoted in Paravisini-Gebert 2012: 239.
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Contemporary Indian Novel in English. London: Palgrave McMillan.
Murphy, Kieran M. 2011. White Zombie in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies
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White Zombie. (1932). Dir. Victor Halperin. RKO-Path Studios. 69 mins.
Kerstin Olo
Pi.1iu oviv 1ui v.s1: Iuioiocv .u Ecoiocv i Isv.iis
N.1io.i Eco-Im.ci.vv
HnNNnn Bons1
46
Te recent growth of postcolonial ecocriticism has done much to dispel Rob Nixons
concern in the 1990s that literary environmentalism was developing, de facto,
as an ofshoot of American studies (2011: 235). However, many key writers in
postcolonial ecocriticism notably Ken Saro-Wiwa, Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati
Roy, discussed by critics including Graham Huggan and Helen Timn (2010) - are
already canonical within postcolonial studies. Te discovery of ecocriticism at the
heart of postcolonialism allows new readings of well-studied texts and strengthens
the academic legitimacy that ecocriticism has struggled to establish given its activist
origins. However, the suspicion that the postcolonial canon is simply being translated
into an ecocritical mode is hard to avoid when shortcomings of postcolonial studies
have also been reproduced. One shared blind spot is the absence of Israeli and
Palestinian writing from postcolonial ecocriticism, mirroring the marginalisation of
these literatures within postcolonial studies (Bernard 2010). In this essay I use the
example of national imaginaries of nature in Israel/Palestine to draw out the changing
environmental dimensions of the confict, and to stress the potential for postcolonial
ecocriticism to move beyond the postcolonial canon. I argue for an ecocriticism that
is more closely aligned with geography and environmental history than has so far
been the case in a feld which remains in the shadow of its formative Heideggerean
philosophies of dwelling (Spencer 2010). In doing so, I foreground the need for a
dialectical close reading of discursive techniques and the material histories of literary
environments.
On the surface, the Israel-Palestine confict appears to be about a contested
partition of land. If this were so then, as Nasser Abufarha suggests, it might be
resolved through material redistribution (2008: 343). Te confict is also about the
ways in which land is imagined, and the sense of national belonging produced.
We might call this intersection between nationalism and nature, with reference to
Benedict Andersons theory of nations as imagined communities (1991), a national
eco-imaginary. William Cronon argues in the context of the American West that
attributing national signifcance to nature can suppress alternative national narratives
of belonging, becoming a tool of political power (1995: 42). As I discuss, national eco-
imaginaries can also lead to the land itself being degraded.
Tis article explores the history of the Zionist national eco-imaginary in relation
to the production of a Judaized landscape in Israel/Palestine over the twentieth
century. Landscape will be a central term, as it captures the ways in which nations
literally and fguratively construct nature, altering its appearance and investing it with
47
signifcations; landscape is not an inert fact, but a cultural practice (Mitchell 2002:
1). Creating an Israeli landscape began with the frst Zionist settlers in the nineteenth
century, but accelerated with the establishment of Israel in 1948 (Tal 2002: 82). Te
most striking way in which it has taken place is through aforestation by the Israeli
environmental organisation Keren Kayemet LYisrael, the Jewish National Fund
(JNF). Intensive planting in Israel/Palestine coincided with the rise of the Western
green movement, which tends to see concern for nature as an unproblematic good,
transcending politics.
1
In recent years, the JNF has aligned itself with this movement,
positioning Israel as an environmental pioneer:
Israel is the only country in the world that entered the twenty-frst century with
a net gain in the number of trees. Environmental policies may be fashionable
today, but JNF UK has been pursuing them for decades
(JNF UK website, 2011).
Te environmentalist assumption that green is good has obscured the ways in which
trees, in Irus Bravermans words, have functioned as weapons of war in Israel/
Palestine (2009a: 319). I argue that Israels apparently neutral planting has played a
key role in the confict, performing both the erasure of Palestine as an Arab space and
the naturalisation of Israeli presence.
Scholars from environmental history (Benvenisti 2000), legal geography
(Braverman 2009a; 2009b) and biology (Tal 2002) have analysed planting in Israel/
Palestine. Tere has however been little critical response to depictions of forests in
Israeli and Palestinian literature, despite the recent growth of ecocriticism. I address
this absence by exploring the ways in which a text from the frst years of Israels history
and a text published in the early twenty-frst century engage with the Israeli national
eco-imaginary.
A. B. Yehoshuas short story Facing the Forests (FF) was written in 1963, ffeen
years afer the Israeli War of Independence, while Picnic Grounds by Oz Shelach
(PG), self-described as a novel in fragments, was published in 2003, and presents a
contemporary perspective on attitudes towards nature in Israel. Yehoshuas story is
written in the spare, modernist style characteristic of the Israeli authors known as the
Generation of the State, which also includes Amos Oz and Aharon Appelfeld, who
framed their disillusion with the Zionist project by challenging the realism of pre-
1948 nation-building literature (Mintz 1997: 12). In contrast to the linear form of FF,
PG collects together a number of very short fragments which make up a novel, but
one that could seemingly be read in any order, containing no overarching narrative
or recurring characters. While these aesthetic diferences are related to literary shifs
in representation, as I discuss later, they also resonate with Israels changing national
eco-imaginary.
Te forests in these texts have been interpreted as allegories of a deeper Israeli
culture of denial (Yael Zerubavel 1996: 81), but I argue for a reading which takes
Hannah Boast
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their portrayal of nature seriously, as a literal representation of the changing material
histories of forests and arboriculture in Israel/Palestine. Comparative analysis of the
texts reveals that their forests are not just symbols of false memory, but responses
to and critiques of the changing relationship between landscape and Israeli national
identity over time. Yehoshua and Shelach share many representational strategies;
signifcantly, both link Palestinians metaphorically to the land, showing that it
is impossible to understand the Israel-Palestine confict without recognising its
environmental politics. However, the diferences between their texts give the most
telling indication of the changes in the Israeli national eco-imaginary over time. I
conclude by discussing the recent work of Raja Shehadeh, showing how his writing
ofers a valuable new paradigm for writing about the Israeli/Palestinian landscape.
To understand the connections between landscape and nationalism in Israel/
Palestine, we should frst establish a theoretical framework for analysing the role
of forests in national eco-imaginaries. Juval Portugali writes that nationalisms
elementary particles are territory, place and environment [...] in relation to people
and their collective memories (1993: 37). Marked by a communitys activity over a
long period of time, a landscape embodies national ways of life, and is frequently seen
as the source of a national spirit (Smith 1986: 183). Te tree features regularly as a
symbol of national character, rootedness and permanence: examples are the English
oak, the Lebanese cedar and the Japanese cherry blossom. Te relation between
collective memory and landscape is not simply a process of projection, but can
motivate a desire to physically alter the land in order to protect or reproduce parts of
national signifcance (Herb 1999: 23). As Mitchell observes, the power of ideological
alterations of an environment is that their appearance as a given and inevitable part
of nature conceals their political origin (2002: 2). Landscape interpellates the viewer
in relation to this givenness (Mitchell 2002: 2), creating a sense of homeland among
members of a nation and producing their presence in the land as a natural fact, while
excluding members of other nations from experiencing the same sense of belonging.
Te national eco-imaginary becomes a domain of confict when two nations claim
a single area of land on the basis of difering collective memories and signifcances.
In Israel/Palestine, two species of tree have taken on iconic status; the pine for Israel
and the olive for Palestine. Since its 1901 inception, the JNF has planted over 240
million trees (JNF UK 2011), mostly pine, most since 1948 (Tal 2002: 77). Tis has
transformed the landscape of Israel/Palestine only ten percent of its forests today
existed before 1948 (Pappe 2006: 225). Reading ideology into aforestation might
appear unnecessary when there are environmental and economic reasons for the
practice. Small-scale planting was introduced during the British Mandate to prevent
soil erosion, while the early JNF harboured hopes of creating a timber industry (Tal
2002: 84-5). Nonetheless, pragmatic concerns alone cannot explain the uprooting of
indigenous Palestinian orange and olive trees that has taken place alongside planting
(Braverman 2009b: 15). Neither can they account for the JNF preference for European-
looking pine.
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Te most immediate way in which aforestation serves Israeli state interests is that
the materiality of trees allows them to mark strategically-important space as Israeli
until permanent ownership markers are built (Cohen 1993: 151). Forests also provide
camoufage for military activity (Amir and Rechtman 2006: 43). However, the cultural
signifcance of planting can be traced to the ancient descriptions of Palestine as heavily
forested that ground the Zionist eco-imaginary. In the Bible, southern Galilee is called
the woods of nations (Tal 2002: 37), while the frst century BC historian Josephus
described Palestine as a blooming garden with fruit trees of all kinds (Cohen 1993:
41). Two thousand years later, Mark Twain was disappointed to encounter the desolate
country of Palestine (1869: 488), and Herzl was surprised to discover upon his only
visit that Palestine did not mirror his Austrian homeland (Cohen 1993: 47).
Te wadis, deserts and olive groves of Palestine were represented as the result
of poor environmental stewardship, not as diverse ecosystems in their own right
(Benvenisti 2000: 60), integrated into Palestinian ways of life. Aforestation was part
of the process of redeeming the land and recreating Palestine as the mythical Jewish
moledet, homeland. It also recalls a peculiarly modern colonial discourse, termed
conservation imperialism by Ramachandra Guha (1997), in which a claimed superior
ecological sensitivity justifes the expropriation of land from its indigenous population.
Israels appropriation of land in the name of nature is mirrored in the attitudes of
many biologists, conservation organisations and governments towards what are seen
as internationally signifcant areas of biodiversity and wilderness. Mark Dowie (2009),
Zoe Young (2002), and Ramachandra Guha (1997) have recorded the harmful efects
on indigenous people of interventions on behalf of the global environment, which
Guha condemns as an ecologically-updated version of the White Mans Burden
(1997: 104). Removing indigenous inhabitants and placing their land into the hands
of experts risks erasing local knowledge that is vital to ecosystem management. Israeli
forest history illustrates the environmental damage caused by this approach.
In the 1930s, pine was chosen as the tree to redeem the land of Israel/Palestine,
specifcally Pinus halepensis, Aleppo pine. It was believed to be climax fauna for the
region (Biger and Liphschitz 2001: 428), a term which, in the theory of succession,
describes the plants contained in an ecosystem in its fnal, stable state. Tis has since
been disputed, not least because the concept of succession has been overhauled
(Worster 1994: 393), but because climatic factors and pines susceptibility to pests have
shown it to be unsuited to the Israeli/Palestinian environment; Biger and Liphschitz
show that, despite the claims of theologians and mid-century Israeli biologists, pine
was rare in historic Palestine (2001: 428). Problems with pine were discovered as early
as 1933, yet pine remained the favoured species until the 1970s and still represents
a high percentage of JNF-planted forests (Tal 2002: 85-6). Pines also damaged
indigenous ecosystems: fallen needles create a poisonous ground cover that prevents
other plants and most animals from surviving, while the process of preparing land for
planting - fres, heavy machinery and pesticides stripped the soil (Tal 2002: 94-5).
Te choice of pine represents a stigmatisation of Arab landscapes and an
Hannah Boast
50
imposition of a moral geography in which Israel/Palestine is redeemed by being
produced in the image of a civilised European landscape. Planting forests that
conform to the picturesque, a key infuence on Western ecological sensibilities (Bate
2000: 138), demonstrates Israels European-style environmental values, bolstering its
claim to being culturally, politically and economically, just not geographically part
of Europe (Pinhas Sapir, cited in Nissim Rejwan 1999: 96). Erasing the Arab-ness
of Israel/Palestine by planting pines also imposes a new historical narrative on the
landscape, reinforcing the Zionist idea of Palestine as terra nullius prior to Jewish
settlement, while naturalising Israels presence. Interpreting pines as planted over the
past becomes compelling when we consider that many Israeli forests and parks cover
Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948 (Pappe 2006: 229).
JNF forests feature prominently in FF and PG and are usually read as symbols
of broader Israeli cultural problems. FF is set in a newly-created JNF forest, planted
over a razed Palestinian village. Consisting of pines, always and only the one species,
obstinately, unvaryingly (207), it could be any early JNF monoculture plantation. Te
protagonist, a nameless student struggling for inspiration with writing, becomes a fre
watcher in the forest on his friends advice (204). His only companions are an old
Arab labourer whose tongue was cut out during the war and the Arabs daughter.
Te student is gradually forced to learn the truth about the forest, which is fnally
burnt down by the Arab, revealing the ruined village born anew in its basic outlines
(233). FF is typically read as a return of the repressed political narrative; Zerubavel
interprets the fre as the liberation of a Palestinian memory suppressed by Israeli
national monuments (1996: 81). Benvenisti (2000: 325-7) and Urian (1997: 101) ofer
similar interpretations.
Fragments in PG are frequently set in JNF forests with a violent history. Te tone
is set by the frst fragment, One Afernoon (1), in which a history professor takes his
son for a picnic in a quiet pinewood where they arrange three square stones around
their fre as a windbreak. Te narrator indicates the origin of these unnaturally-shaped
stones with his spare remark that the area was formerly known as Deir Yassin (1), the
site of a pivotal 1948 massacre of Palestinian villagers. Little critical material on PG
exists, but it has been interpreted as a comment on the denial embedded in Israeli
culture, specifcally the failure to acknowledge responsibility for the Nakba, with
forests as one part of Israels selective memory (Coleman 2001; Mariko 2009: 89-107;
Ehrenreich 2003).
In conventional readings of FF and PG, the forests function as potentially
substitutable symbols. However, Yehoshua and Shelachs ways of representing the forests
are fundamental to understanding the changes in Israels national eco-imaginary over
the forty years between their times of writing. In FF, we see that forests are not yet fully
integrated into national narratives. FF was written when aforestation was new, and
the foreignness of the forests is seen in the characters surprise that forests might grow
in Israel. When it is frst suggested that the student could become a fre watcher he is
astonished, laughs inordinately and exclaims Forests...What forests? Since when do
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we have forests in this country? (204). Yehoshuas description of an odd, charming
stone house at a high altitude among the young, slender pines (207-8) recalls an
Alpine landscape, suggesting the Europeanising undertones of Israeli aforestation.
As discussed, reshaping the land played a key role in erasing the history of an Arab
presence in Israel/Palestine. Comments by visitors to Yehoshuas forest indicate that
this process had not yet entirely succeeded. A group of hikers asks, Where is this Arab
village that is marked on the map? (219).
Te forests in PG still cause characters in Te Road to Jerusalem to remind
themselves they are not in Switzerland (57), but generally contrast sharply with
Yehoshuas rather artifcial forest. Afer over forty years the forests appear natural
and have become integrated into Israeli life, becoming signifcant within national
identity as sites for performances of belonging to the land. While the dominant sense
of Yehoshuas forest is an unnerving Silence, a silence of trees (208) and tourists
visit infrequently, forests in PG are always described in relation to recreational and
cultural activities taking place within them, showing how extensive planting and its
accompanying cultural performances have become in the years separating the texts.
PG includes various cultural practices that engage with the national eco-imaginary.
Te fragment Tu Bshvat (29), named afer the Jewish festival which celebrates the
new year of the trees, depicts children participating in the annual tree planting ritual.
Prior to Israels creation Tu Bshvat was a minor event in the Jewish calendar and did
not involve planting, but during the latter half of the twentieth century it evolved into
a patriotic performance of rootedness (Bardenstein 1999: 160). Other fragments
narrate yediat haaretz, knowing the land, a broad school subject which is described
by Benvenisti as a combination of geography, geology, history, ethnology, botany and
zoology, taught to nurture a sense of intimate association with and belonging to the
land (2000: 57). Te phrase yediat haaretz is not used in PG, but alluded to in episodes
such as Being First (21), which describes a primary school trip to a nearby forest to
learn about pines, and Tea Outdoors, in which Young Guardian members learned to
taste the land on a forest expedition by making a drink from wild plants (77).
Te most common forest location in PG is, inevitably, picnic grounds, and it is
in these spaces that the most unsettling re-narrativisation of the Israeli/Palestinian
landscape takes place. Unlike Yehoshuas hikers, visitors to Shelachs picnic grounds
are rarely aware of their former life as the sites of Palestinian villages. In Being First
children from the Jerusalem suburb Bayt HaKerem break the shells of pine nuts by
crushing them on what are suggestively described as fat rocks (21), without realising
that, as in One Afernoon (1), these stones could easily be from one of the Palestinian
homes under Jerusalem Forest. If Yehoshuas hikers had discovered the stones it is
likely that they would have drawn this connection. However, since FF was written,
elaborate new histories have been created around selected ruins of Palestinian villages
that were deliberately lef in picnic grounds by the JNF, to complement the narratives
created by planting. Stones are presented through information signs as the remains of
Crusader castles, so ancient that they are part of nature (Benvenisti 2000: 303). Tis
Hannah Boast
52
history appears to have been accepted by Shelachs schoolchildren.
Te processes of creating a unifed historical narrative of the landscape may have
gained in complexity since Yehoshua described a single, unnamed forest, but the form
of Shelachs novel suggests that contemporary narratives are not necessarily more
stable. Te careful attention paid by Shelach to locating specifc activities in named
forests or areas nearby combines with the paratactic narrative structure, which leaps
between apparently unconnected episodes, to produce a productive spatial metaphor.
Tis suggests both the shrinking of Israel through the new highways mentioned in the
text (15, 63, 99), recalling David Harveys observation of the time-space compression
of contemporary capitalism (1990: 147), at the same time as indicating the increasing
complication of Israels geography through its West Bank expansion, refected in
the cover image of the Jerusalem map split by a dotted Green Line. Shelachs novel
also gestures through its typographic presentation at the way in which material facts
infuence our interpretations, signalling through blank pages and heavy indents around
the text that the imagination is strongly implicated in writing over discontinuities
in both national and literary narratives to create coherence. While FF questions the
process of establishing a national eco-imaginary, the interplay between text, form and
materiality in PG suggests that this eco-imaginary is impossible to sustain.
One way in which both texts subvert the narratives of Israeli rootedness embodied
in the forests is through metaphorical slippages between representations of Palestinians
and Palestinian ecosystems. Vladimir Jabotinsky posited a Palestinian connection to
nature in order to denigrate Palestinians as barbarous and ignorant, describing them
as a yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags (cited in Said and Hitchens 2001:
241). However, the links between Palestinians and nature in Yehoshua and Shelachs
texts are closer to the Palestinian tradition of resisting Israeli colonisation through
articulating Palestinian belonging to the land, seen in Mahmoud Darwish (1984: 13)
and Ghassan Kanafani (1958). Military allusions to describe the creation of forests
feature in both FF and PG, suggesting continuity between environmental damage and
Palestinian displacement. In FF the pines are personifed as soldiers: erect, slim, serious;
like a company of new recruits awaiting their commander (215). In the fragment
Ayn Lavan, Shelach describes a hike in a pine forest near Qiryat Menachem by two
Israeli families, during which they come across what is apparently a natural spring
surrounded by walnut trees (55). Te trees are bare of leaves, suggesting that they are
struggling to survive, and have white branches like upraised arms, an image blending
the white fag and submissive posture of surrender. Te title Ayn Lavan translates
as white spring, which might be taken to mean that the earth has surrendered to
conquest.
2
Ofen the only way to uncover the buried historical narrative of a piece of
land in Israel/Palestine is to search for indigenous trees planted by Palestinians around
their homes (2010: 82) and the positioning of trees near a spring in this fragment
certainly echoes the topography of a Palestinian village. Tis interpretation is lent
plausibility by the location of Qiryat Menachem near Jerusalem Forest.
Te greatest representational contrast between FF and PG is the threats to the
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forests in each text. Te main risk to the forest in FF is the Arab labourer, who is
suspected of harbouring a wish to set fre to the forest (213, 222) and who eventually
does. Arson has featured in Palestinian liberation since the beginnings of resistance in
the 1920s; in the frst intifada it caused one third of forest fres in Israel (Fighel 2009:
803). Since forests are central to Israeli narratives of national belonging, burning them
is a powerful symbolic act of resistance to the Israeli presence, and a rejection of the
Nakba denial represented by planting. In this sense FF anticipates the importance that
national eco-imaginaries would assume as the confict deepened.
Te above is a postcolonial reading of the Arab as revealer of historical truth.
However, Yehoshuas preoccupation with Israeli ecology and the increasing awareness
of the environmental problems caused by aforestation prior to publication of FF
(Tal 2002: 94-5) underscore the need for an additional ecocritical interpretation. Te
possibility of postcolonial and ecocritical readings indicates that each version alone
only accesses half of the texts meaning, and that a full understanding of the story - and
by extension, the confict - requires both perspectives.
Yehoshuas tongue-less Arab can be read as an ecological agent, restoring the
ecological balance of the land by burning down the harmful pines. His muteness
symbolises the silencing of alternative histories of the confict, yet his lack of the
power of speech, ofen seen as a uniquely human quality, places him on the borderline
between the human and nonhuman worlds. Tis impression is sustained by the
mirroring of the Arabs silence with the silence of the pines, and by the way in which he
and his daughter appear to move amongst the trees as though the forest had conceived
them (219). Tis section is set in summer, when forest fres occur naturally in Israel
(Kliot 1996: 2). Te key contributory factor of hot desert winds (230) is mentioned
just before the fre is started, implying that the Arabs actions are akin to a natural
force. Te rejection of pines in the conclusion gives the lie to the JNF aforestation
managers assertion that nature itself is harnessed to our great enterprise here (221).
Te managers comment echoes a JNF hydrologist in the 1950s, who, in response to a
Dutch hydrologists concern that peat deposits might spoil attempts to drain the Huleh
swamp, reportedly declared: Our peat is Zionist peat. It will not do damage (cited in
Tal 2002: 97).
Forty years later, the main threat to the Israeli national eco-imaginary is not
Palestinian, but Israeli. In contemporary Israel, the industry, urban expansion
and infrastructure of late capitalism and the specifc political need to translate the
Occupation into facts on the ground through development (Weizman 2007) threaten
to engulf the forests. As discussed above, many fragments in PG are set in Jerusalem
Forest, which, although the citys green lung, has been damaged by human activities.
It was threatened at the turn of the millennium by a proposed expansion of the
Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, has been shrunk drastically since its 1950s creation, and
spoiled ecologically and aesthetically by construction refuse and pylons (Tsur 2001).
In Shelachs Waking Up, Jerusalem Forest is a wood, a bufer strip between luxury
residential areas and the highway to Tel-Aviv (15); in Ayn Lavan, mountain scenery is
Hannah Boast
54
spoilt by an egg-packing factory and a small double-peaked mound of construction
refuse (55). Shelachs fragments illustrate a tension in Israeli identity, between the
Zionist image of the kibbutz-dwelling, land-labouring Sabra and the modern city-
dwelling Israeli.
Tese two fragments appear to criticise the narratives of denial embodied by the
forests, yet also to mourn their demise. Examining other fragments indicates that
contemporary development and planting in FF and PG stem from an enduring attitude
towards nature. Te Israeli eco-imaginary is a way of possessing the land rather than
belonging to it, leading to environmental degradation. In Shelachs Te End (87),
the narrator remarks that an orchard owner who sells his land had developed a
sense of belonging to the land, which meant that the land belonged to him. Shelach
contrasts these modes of belonging in Te Night Sky (67), which presents two ways
of communing with the land: that of a Palestinian village which was bombed out
and later razed and of visitors to the picnic ground created on its site. Te village
is described as a paradigm of sustainable living: pastures and natural fowerbeds,
donkeys, farmer children, olive groves, and even carrots, onions and lettuces that grew
scattered among the olives. In contrast, a single, bleak adjective summarises the picnic
ground: dusty. For Shelach, the picnic ground is part of the same assault on the land
as industrialisation and armored vehicles [...] grinding the desert sand. Tis suggests,
ironically, that Palestinian village life represented the Zionist ideal of knowing the
land more successfully than any of Israels parks.
Qualifcation is needed here, since claims of a deep Palestinian connection to the
land verge on Orientalism, and it would be naive to assume that the pastoral society
described in Te Night Sky would have been assured indefnitely, even without Israels
interference. Tis is pertinent when a third of Palestinians lived in urban areas prior to
1948 (Benvenisti 2000: 6-7). However, it should not stop us from recognising that vast
areas of land have been transformed since the creation of Israel, and that the removal
of Palestinian villagers from their farms in many cases represented the substitution of
unsustainable for sustainable ways of life.
PG and FF show that investing land with national symbolism can allow us to forget
that its capacity to embody our ideas and aspirations is subject to ecological laws. In
the case of Israel/Palestine, the narrative privileging green, picturesque, Europeanised
landscapes has led to Israels fre-prone and pest-ravaged forests. Yehoshua and
Shelachs criticisms of the Israeli approach to nature indicate the need for a reimagining
of landscape in Israel/Palestine in a way that is conscious of its potential for political
appropriation, while working to restore a sense of its fundamental materiality.
In conclusion, I would like to gesture briefy to a potentially productive mode of
re-imagining the Israeli/Palestinian environment, as embodied in the work of Raja
Shehadeh. Shehadeh translates the Palestinian cause into the vocabulary of ecological
justice, campaigning for equal access to land and resources, yet avoids replacing one
national eco-imaginary with another. He rejects the nationalistic mode of seeing
that frames a landscape as abstract grand vistas, focusing on sensory experience of
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individual environmental details: we decided to stop by the side of the road whenever
we felt like it and examine the wild fowers in their beauty the bugloss, the poppies,
cyclamens and hollyhocks (2010: 49). Shehadehs practice involves knowing the land,
only without the false histories and environmental irresponsibility that this practice
entails.
Shehadeh suggests that justice for Palestinians and careful use of Israel/Palestines
environment would not mean removing Israelis; instead, shared environmental
concern could contribute to confict resolution. Shehadeh puts forward this argument
in Palestinian Walks (2008), a memoir in which he reprises the role of a postcolonial
Toreau, recording decades of wanderings around the Ramallah hills and their
changing landscape under occupation. Robert Spencer points out that Shehadehs
digressive form reinforces the critique of dominating attitudes towards land in the
content, by resisting forcing landscape into a systematic vision (2010: 40). On his
penultimate walk, Shehadeh encounters a young Israeli settler, with whom a polite but
terse conversation descends into a political argument (194). A fragile peace emerges
when the men acknowledge a shared love of the land, including the little stream we
each call by the same name, afer the same tree, pronounced in our diferent ways
(201). Shehadeh refects that Tese are my hills despite how things are turning out. But
they also belong to whoever can appreciate them (202). Tis is no vague declaration of
global ecological citizenship; it demonstrates a love for local features of a specifc land
that transcends their nationalist signifcations. Existing transnational environmental
initiatives in Israel/Palestine show that this is not overoptimistic (Jeremy Benstein
2003).
Shehadehs tentative post-national moment ofers a reimagining of the connection
between landscape and identity in the direction pointed towards by Yehoshua and
Shelach. Israeli national identity cannot be understood without reference to its
environmental component, yet as Shehadeh indicates, there will be no resolution to the
confict unless nationalistic, possessive attitudes towards not just land, but landscape,
are overcome. Critics eager to expand postcolonial ecocriticism beyond its current
geographical limitations might consider the role of national eco-imaginaries in the
Israel-Palestine context, and the possibilities they present for producing an ecocritical
practice rooted frmly in both the literary and material worlds.
Hannah Boast is a PhD student in literature and cultural geography at the University
of York and the University of Shepeld. Her research focuses on the culture and politics
of water in Israel and Palestine, with particular reference to diasporic identities, urban
environments and theories of the national body. She is a member of the interdisciplinary
White Rose network on Hydropolitics: Community, Environment and Confict in an
Unevenly Developed World.
Hannah Boast
56
ENuNo1vs
1. Tis can largely be attributed to the enduring popularity of deep ecology, a form of ecocentrism
which, in the words of one of its principal ecocritical advocates, Jonathan Bate, doubts the value
of the crude old model of Lef and Right as a basis for dealing with environmental crisis (1991:
3-4). See Devall and Sessions (1985).
2. I am grateful to Anna Bernard for this translation.
RvvvnvNcvs
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twentieth century: Implications for the Future, Forest Policy and Economics, 8(1): 35-51.
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Recall in the Present. Hanover: University Press of New England: 148-170.
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Activism among Palestinians and Jews in Israel. Tel Aviv: Abraham Joshua Heschel Center for
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the mountains of Israel (Palestine), Te Holocene 11(4): 427-436.
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. 2009b. Uprooting Identities: Te Regulation of Olive Trees in the Occupied West Bank,
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of Land in the Jerusalem Periphery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Devall, Bill and George Sessions. 1985. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered. Layton, Utah:
Gibbs Smith.
Dowie, Mark. 2009. Conservation Refugees: Te Hundred-Year Confict Between Global
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Conservation and Native People. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
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villagevoice.com/2003-08-05/books/the-real-israel/ [Accessed 16 March 2011].
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Alier. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South. London: Earthscan: 3-21.
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March 2011].
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Environmental Facility. London: Pluto Press.
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Green Letters Volume 16
Pos1-NAFTA Ecoiociis: Micu.ic.i Tov1oisis .u Fiowiv-
Picxic Cuoios i S.iv.uov Pi.scici.s Tur Provir or Pzvrv
Gvonov ENo::sn Bnooxs
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As border controls tighten, academically as elsewhere, we need to commit
ourselves to a policy of imaginative mass trespass over the established
boundaries of literary history.
Peter Hulme (2009: 45)
Te uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative production
[] is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains
the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be
found in real life
Sigmund Freud, Te Uncanny
Introducing their 1991 collection Criticism in the Borderlands, Hctor Caldern
and Jos David Saldvar call for a new awareness of the historical and cultural
interdependence of both northern and southern American hemispheres, a project
made urgent not only by the four-century mestizo (of mixed Native American and
Spanish descent) presence in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, but also due to the infux
of Tird World immigrants and the rapid re-Hispanicisation of much of Mexican
America and the wider United States (7). Two decades later, recognition of this
interdependence remains fraught, as evidenced in the border state of Arizona, where
in January of this year a bill went into efect banning all ethnic studies programs in
public schools. Previously taught titles have been physically confscated from high
school classrooms, including Acuas Occupied America: A History of Chicanos,
Anzaldas Borderlands/La Frontera, and over seventy others (Rodriguez 2012;
Reese 2012). Tis book-banning indicates the extent of Anglocentric denial of the
basic historical characteristics of the region and its roughly 30% Hispanic/Chicana/o
population. It also underscores the discursive (as opposed to temporal) character of
the post- in postcolonial, as coloniality continues to take forms such as globalization,
neoliberal free trade agreements, and the cultural suppression of those displaced
by such imperial designs (Hulme 2008: 392). Furthermore, the banned titles signify
Anglo-American anxiety toward Mexican-American place-based narratives that
register alternative claims across the borderlands.
While ecocritics are probably familiar with banned writers such as Luis Alberto
Urrea and Gloria Anzalda, others, such as teatro campesino farmworkers theatre
founder Luis Valdez, are likely to be less familiar, or even considered outside the
purview of mainstream environmental writing. Te reciprocal unease with which
60
environmental criticism and Chicana/o studies have regarded each other closely
follows the contours of the relationship between ecocriticism and hemispheric and
postcolonial literary criticisms (DeLoughrey and Handley 2011: 20-30). Devon Pea
has observed that, until the emergence of the environmental justice movement over
the last decade or so, many Chicano scholars accepted the notion that ecology and
environmentalism are primarily white, middle-class concerns, and that Chicano
environmentalism is not so much about the preservation of nature and wilderness
as it is about struggles to confront daily hazards and threats to health and well-
being in environments where we live and work (1998: 6-15). Recent critical debate
has grown increasingly aware of such tensions, arguing for more precisely located
conceptualizations of the dynamics of specifc regional histories and environments
in relation to the larger forces of globalization. For example, Pablo Mukherjee argues
that Guha and Martinez-Aliers concept of the environmentalism of the poor can
no longer be understood as a homogenous phenomenon, since the global south
itself is composed of fractures that run along class lines that condition the various
relationships of humans with their environments (2010: 78). Tus, Mukherjee cites
what he calls the northern environmentalism of the poor, one expression of which is
the struggle for Latino and Black American communities against the housing, water
and air pollution of their inner city districts (32-3).
Applying ecocritical and postcolonial approaches to the literature of the Mexico-
U.S. borderlands as inter-American or transnational hemispheric literature
can ofer signifcant insights into how representations of migration (human and
otherwise), labour, and the regions complex political histories and material ecologies
can inform our understanding of place and community, especially as they are rapidly
being transformed by globalization. In this article, I will use Salvador Plascencias
Te People of Paper (2005) as a case study of a text that merits closer attention from
both postcolonialists and ecocritics, demonstrating how the novels magical realist
aesthetics and metafctional devices open up new methodological possibilities for
reading other border writing through the combined contexts of hemispheric, colonial
environmental, and literary histories.
Laura Barbas-Rhoden reminds us that it is important not to elide the regional,
environmental and cultural diferences between the Mexico-U.S. borderlands and the
postcolonial Americas, or to confate indigenous Latin American peoples and U.S.
Latinos: Te Americas are a vast territory of myriad ecosystems and bioregions [
comprising] hundreds of diferent native languages and diferent histories before and
trajectories taken since European contact, colonization and immigration (2011: 8).
For our purposes here, however, a brief overview of colonialism in the Americas will
prove useful, since, as Romn de la Campa argues, the century-old migratory fow of
Latin Americans to the United States [] calls for a comparative focus for postcolonial
studies in the United States and Latin America (2008: 441, 449).
In contrast to Old World models of Orientalism and Occidentalism wherein
Western culture historically defned itself through assertion of diference from a non-
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Western Other the Americas can be better understood as a place wherein European
identity has attempted to replicate or extend itself over largely depopulated lands
(Mignolo 2000: 51). Coloniality in the Americas has perpetrated the removal and
erasure of indigenous peoples, species, and ecosystems, and the continued exploitation
and marginalization of those that remain. Tis exploitation has taken the form of
plantation and mining labour, cash crop monocultures, and the appropriation and
privatisation of basic resources previously held in common, such as land and water.
More recently, under NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement, put into
efect by the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. in 1994), it has involved the
dismantling of subsistence agriculture and other traditional livelihoods in favour of
globally competitive national economic models (such as outmigration, remittances,
and maquiladora labour). Each of these stages of development has enacted various
forms of violence against the social fabric of local peoples and the environments that
sustain them, many of which can be characterized by what Rob Nixon terms slow
violence: an attritional violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time
and space (2011: 2). As Nixon argues, the temporal nature and the scale of slow
violence require new representational modes of, and critical attention to, texts that
respond to the most critical challenges of our time (3).
Hemispheric and transnational conceptions of American literature have
long ofered a range of alternatives to strictly national and regional approaches to
environmental and postcolonial criticism. As early as 1891, the Cuban poet and
political theorist Jos Mart introduced the hemispheric term Nuestra [Our] Amrica,
which has since come to imply a strong critique of U.S. imperialism (Belnap and
Fernndez 1998: 5). Similarly, La otra [the Other] Amrica has been used in Latin
America and the Caribbean over the last several decades to refer to alternatives to
US political and cultural hegemony (Hulme 2009: 36-7). While these terms help to
imaginatively and ideologically locate anti-colonial and environmental writing of the
Americas, Amrico Paredes more regionally-specifc Greater Mexico will serve to
better place my discussion of this novels geographical and historical context. Richard
Bauman defnes Greater Mexico as comprehending both Mxico de Adentro [from
within] and Mxico de Afuera [from without], the former encompassed by the
political borders of the Republic of Mexico, the latter taking in all those parts of
North America where people of Mexican descent have established a presence and
have maintained their Mexicanness as a key part of their cultural identity (1993: xi).
People of Paper is set within this Greater Mexico, a region where Latin America not
only exists in its original territories but is also disseminated in adoptive countries
(Moraa, Dussel and Juregui 2008: 15). Tis cultural dissemination can be traced
in hemispheric literary terms through the way in which the Latin American Boom
novel and magical realist aesthetics have been received in the North American literary
market, itself an index of the transnational commodifcation of fction (de Zavalia
2000; Molloy 2005).
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Metaction, Irrealist Aesthetics and the Post-NAFTA Novel
First published in 2005 by McSweeneys, Mexican-American writer Salvador Plasencias
novel self-consciously plays into and subverts Anglo-American fetishization of magical
realism. Given the complexity of its formal structure, I will forgo a full summary of
the novel for a brief outline of its setting and several of its formal qualities, characters
and themes that will feature in this analysis. Te novels choral narrative wherein
multiple characters narrate from diferent perspectives revolves around several
plots, refracted into frst-person, third-person, and alternating points of view. Tese
multiple threads of storytelling are ofen lined up in parallel columns on the same
page, and are eventually juxtaposed in perpendicular columns, up to six on a single
page. Tis experimental typography is pushed further by the inclusion of images
(lotera cards, gang tags, hand gestures, musical staves, and other symbols), the use
of large black circles and rectangles that partially or completely obscure passages of
text, various other forms of sous rature (or under erasure) text, and even places where
words are physically cut out of the page (See Figure 1).
Set primarily in El Monte, California, People of Paper (PoP) embeds the citys
story within the colonial history of the region and hemisphere. Te actual El Monte,
incorporated in 1912, claims historically to have been both the end of the Santa Fe
Trail and the frst site in Southern California to be settled by people from other areas
of the United States rather than by people from Spain or Mexico (Caras). Although
Figure 1
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much of this colonial history has since been engulfed by the sprawl of Los Angeles
County, PoP recasts the city, where Plascencia grew up, within a broader inter-
American context, contextualizing local histories, autobiography and events inside a
larger mythologized hemispheric history.
Te main plot follows Little Merced and her father, Federico de la Fe, as they
emigrate to southern California from Las Tortugas, a semi-fctionalized town in
Jalisco, Mexico. Passing through Tijuana, they eventually reach the Los Angeles
suburb of El Monte, where Federico takes work as a day labourer, picking fowers
on El Montes carnation and rose plantations. Te novels central metafctional turn
occurs when, together with his fellow fower-pickers and neighbours, Federico wages
a war of representational sovereignty against the narrator, a looming and watchful
cosmic presence called Saturn. Saturn is later revealed to be a man named Salvador
Plascencia, as one of the books characters discovers by crawling through a hole in the
papier-mch sky into the authors bedroom. Tis war takes place amid both Federicos
and Saturn-Plascencias anxieties about the commodifcation of sadness (53). Saturn-
Plascencia, a writer living in upstate New York and writing a novel about El Monte,
is accused of commodifying his experience (presumably for the predominantly white
American audience of McSweeneys): In a neat pile of paper you have ofered up not
only your hometown, EMF, and Federico de la Fe, but also me, your grandparents and
generations beyond them, your patria [] You have sold everything (138).
Other characters in the novel include mechanical tortoises, a child savant named
Baby Nostradamus, and an order of Franciscan monks that conduct pan-American
marches south to the Argentine land of fre and back north to the glacial clifs of
Alaska (11). Te frst character we meet, however, is Antonio, an origami surgeon
who creates and animates people and animals from paper, who then go on to populate
the novel alongside the other characters, diferentiated as people of meat (12).
Te creation story of these paper beings is soon superseded by the bioengineered
innovations of the Swedes which replaced paper, making Antonios creations
obsolete (13). Te simultaneous presence of seemingly incongruous technologies,
epistemologies and cosmologies origami/bioengineering, mythical/rational, paper/
fesh/machine pervades the magical realist antinomies in the novel. By imbricating
El Montes actual story within mythologized histories, Te People of Paper disrupts
either/or conceptions of history and identity in ways only available through magical
realist fction. As Plascencia explains in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, his
mock epic was intended partly as a parody of traditional immigration narratives
(Johnson 2010: 8), but also as a faithful representation of El Monte from the ground
up (Baker 2010; Benavidez 2007; Johnson 2010). In the following analysis, I hope to
illustrate some of the ways in which Plascencias novel might also be read as a post-
NAFTA novel, representing colonial and late twentieth-century history from a post-
NAFTA perspective in the twenty-frst.
My use of NAFTA is not intended as an arbitrarily limiting rubric, but rather as
the most signifcant example of neoliberal capitalist globalisation in the region, one
George English Brooks
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whose efects can be tracked across the North American continent through the socio-
ecological events and phenomena represented in the novel. Aside from creating one
of the worlds largest trade blocs, NAFTA and its attendant market liberalization
policies have had environmental and social impacts in all three countries, perhaps
most dramatically in Mexico, where large-scale privatization and deregulation have
included the dissolution of the ejido (communal land agriculture) system (Nadal
2000: 14). Tematically, PoP is by no means explicitly about NAFTA, which is not
even mentioned in the novel, and much of the narrative is set in a pre-NAFTA world.
However, like those of race or coloniality, the novels representations of globalization,
neoliberal labour, economic migration, environmental refugeeism, and toxicity
are embedded in a post-NAFTA perspective of transnational commodifcation,
displacement, alienation and struggle for community within a rapidly changing
world. Te metafctional, magical realist and ambient poetic modes through which
Plascencias novel represents these events and phenomena all carry meaning in ways
unavailable to the rational, meticulously accurate or literally mimetic realisms that have
characterized so much environmental and Chicano writing to date. As a post-NAFTA
novel, PoP builds on and responds parodically to earlier Chicano, magical realist and
regional environmental writing, particularly in its reworking of the migration story.
Migration, Environmental Refugeeism, and Displacement without Moving
As in conventional Chicana/o narrative, comparisons between the characters lands
of origin and their new environments run throughout the novel, beginning with
Little Merceds story of her familys emigration: [my father] said that we were going
to Los Angelesa world that was built on cement and not mud (19). Contrasts
between Mexico and the U.S. ascribe qualities of both poverty and nostalgia to the
homeland while underscoring the constructed and superfcial nature of the modern,
industrialized North American environment. For example, the tinsel of Hollywood
is contrasted with the adobe theatres of Mexico (50), and stucco homes in California
are referred to simply as stuccos, just as adobe homes in Mexico are simply adobes.
Te repeated trope of adobe vs. stucco is illustrative of the longing for the wholeness
or unity of home, in that adobes are typically built entirely of adobe (clay/mud, sand
and straw), while the stuccos of suburban California only bear an exterior overlay of
the cement and plaster material. Te alleged benefts of modernization are represented
with aesthetic ambivalence that highlights the costs of uneven development, while
the longing for home is expressed less as a desire to return than as an obscure kind of
sadness rooted in displacement.
Te association of this ambivalent sadness with mud and adobe directly emerges
from the characters particular migration stories. Several characters come to El Monte
from the small semi-fctionalized town of El Derramadero, Jalisco, which consists of
eight adobes on a mountain two miles north of Las Tortugas (42). Te towns name
is signifcant, in that derramadero can be translated to mean either spillway and waste
dump, or dispersal, scattering and outpour. Tese multiple aspects are not glossed
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in the novel except for the brief note that one character had come from a town
named afer decay (50). As its name suggests, El Derramadero experiences a gradual
disintegration of everything in sight hillsides, homes, furniture, clothing, tools, even
a dolls marble eyes which forces anyone who refuses to live in plastic to leave. Te
entire town is literally eroded and then rebuilt from imported melted plastic, the only
material to survive the decay:
Shrouded in trash bags, the men of El Derramadero walked down from their
native mountain and returned three days later pulling a wagon flled with slabs
of plastic. Once in El Derramadero, the wagon collapsed and was thrown into
the fre pit where they melted the plastic, shaping it into cutting shanks for
butchering and forming forks and spoons [] Tey cleared the clumps of mud
where their old adobes used to stand and molded igloos complete with plastic
hinges. But [] Julieta did not want to live in a town made from melted plastic.
(45)
Although fctionalized in fantastical terms as a plague of decay and plastic
transformation, this scenario has post-NAFTA analogues. For example, the fooding
of Mexican markets with cheap subsidised U.S. corn (maize) has led to the collapse
of Mexicos corn market, subsistence agriculture, and, in many cases, genetic crop
diversity and local agricultural fertility, as rural communities that have grown corn
for centuries, even millennia, are forced by the competition to farm more intensively,
losing their land to erosion. Te central Mexican region where El Derramadero is
located has been particularly afected by this erosion and topsoil loss (Nadal 2000:
83). Referring to such scenarios, Rob Nixon proposes a more radical notion of
displacement that does not refer solely to migration of peoples, but rather to the loss
of the land and resources beneath them, a loss that leaves communities stranded in
a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable. Displacement
without moving, Nixon explains, entails being simultaneously immobilized and
moved out of ones living knowledge as ones place loses its life-sustaining features.
What might it mean, Nixon asks, for subsistence communities or people declared
disposable by some new economy to discover that their once-sustaining landscapes
have been gutted of their capacity to sustain by an externalizing, instrumental logic?
(2011: 19).
Te irrealist aesthetics of Plascencias novel speak precisely to such interrogations
of the instrumental logic of neoliberal trade agreements like NAFTA. Te town of
melted plastic is a toxic landscape, poisoned by the compulsory consumption of waste
and byproducts exported to the periphery from capitalist cores. El Derramadero is
contextualized in the history of coloniality as a region that has endured Spanish imperial
conquest, Mexican national hegemony, and now global free-market capitalism. Te
toxicity of frst world technologies and environmental displacement are fgured
as magical plagues which render the novels places uninhabitable, especially in the
George English Brooks
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characters new home in the U.S. Te community in El Monte collectively sufers from
a malady of lead that fnally ends in everyone running out to their lawns, hunching
over and vomiting on the grass (182). A two-week fungal plague kills twenty-three
EMF [El Monte Flores] cholos [gangsters] (52). And [f]locks of migrating Oaxacan
songbirds are poisoned as they fy through the smoke from the television factories
or maquilas [] dropping like stones onto the Tijuana streets (76). In Tijuana, as
in El Monte, the Mexico-U.S. border is represented as an unregulated region of local
degradation, a site of global-capitalist exploitation from both sides. Globally marketed
commodities such as electronics, textiles and fowers are either extracted from local
landscapes, manufactured by local communities, or their byproducts are discarded in
illicit local middens.
Migrant Labour, Floriculture, and El Monte Flores
Troughout the novel, El Montes fower plantations become a primary site of socio-
ecological exploitation. As Little Merced explains, many of the undocumented
immigrants to El Monte end up working as day labourers, cutting fowers and
carnations: Instead of hunching over a sewing machine, pulling and ironing fabric
under the glow of fuorescent bulbs, we settled in a small town [] of furrows and
fowers, where my father would work by daylight (33). Te juxtaposition of fuorescent
bulbs with daylight, and of factories with furrows and fowers initially suggests that
picking fowers will ofer the bucolic fulflments of labour in the earth, as opposed
to the corrupting humiliations of sweatshop or maquiladora work. However, Little
Merceds description of foriculture overturns this georgic archetype:
Instead of the prick of sewing needles and pinking shears, it was thorns that
would pierce [Federicos] skin. Te town was called El Monte, afer the hills it
did not have. But everything else was named afer fowers. Las Flores Market,
Las Flores Street, and a small street gang called El Monte Flores. [ EMF] was
the frst street gang born of carnations. But for them there was no sofness in
petals and no aroma in fowers. Tey felt only the splinters and calluses from
tilling the land and smelled only the stench of fertilizer and horse shit. []
And always a cutting knife was in hand. It was from these blades and hands
that bouquets and potpourri came. (33-4)
Te West Coast pastoral imagery of sunshine and fruit trees is replaced by a California
landscape of vast monocultured fower felds, arduously worked by low wage
undocumented Mexican immigrants, and seeded with the bodies of gang victims.
Although its central role in the novel is fantastically fctionalized, El Monte Flores
has been a real presence in the neighbourhoods of El Monte for decades. A far cry
from the bucolic California of produce marketing imagery, the fower felds from
which the gang takes its name are the site of hard labour, exploitation, and violence,
where new members are jumped into the gang through one-minute beatings. One
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such induction of a gang member is contrasted with the rose parades of neighbouring
communities, whose fowers are harvested from El Monte: Te EMF parade, [was]
a parade with no Rose Queen or benches of spectators. Tis was EMFs ceremonial
procession, and as always their newest member sat at the head of the caravan, leaving
behind only tooth fragments and drops of blood to fertilize the soil (37). By linking
this site of agricultural production (where local ecologies have been erased and
replaced by single industrially-cultivated species) with sites of consumption (where
the commodifed fowers themselves bear no evidence of their violent origins), the
novel invites similar interrogation of other commodities, and their environmental and
social costs.
Te historical fetishisation of cut fowers in the U.S. is well documented. From the
mid-nineteenth-century, the growing market for ornamental fowers fostered a trend
toward foral exoticism if not colonialist rampage, ransacking the world for fruits
and fowers, ofen sent hermetically sealed from California (Schmidt 1995: 201).
References to foriculture as fower manufacturing originate as early as 1869, and
with the organization of the Florists Telegraph Delivery Association (FTD) in 1910,
the foral industry was among the frst to enter the resource-exhaustive just-in-time
delivery economy (257). Placed historically within these centre-periphery relationships
of production and consumption, the monocultured fower felds of El Monte merge the
cultural geography of Greater Mexico with the socio-agricultural geography of what
has been referred to as Plantation America (Hulme 2009: 41). Over the last century,
an explosion of petrochemical fertilizer and pesticide use in industrial foriculture has
led to widespread poisoning of watersheds, and vision, neurological, and respiratory
illnesses and birth defects among fower worker communities (Hargreaves-Allen
2003; McQuaid 2011). In the decades following the latter twentieth-century period
depicted in the novel, the fower industrys sites of production, including the former
plantations of El Monte, have largely been outsourced, primarily to the savannah
country of central Columbia (McQuaid).
Jean and John Comarof have noted that globalization has put such a distance
between sites of production and consumption that their relationship becomes all but
unfathomable, save in fantasy (2002: 784). Although much of the representation of El
Montes fower felds maintains a hard, realist aesthetic, it intermittently becomes the
site of some of the novels more fantastic phenomena. Trough these fower felds, the
novels preoccupation with the commodifcation of sadness takes on more material
ramifcations than simply the selling of fctions, counterposing, Ramn Saldvar
argues, the commodifcation of sadness (the purveying of their unending sadness and
other profoundly private thoughts and feelings as commodities for sale) against the
commodity fetishism of reifed labor (the life of poverty and exploitation of these rose
and carnation harvesters) (2011: 583). Eventually the fower felds become a pivotal
battlefeld in the war the characters wage against Saturn-Plascencia. Te central and
deeply ambivalent role played by the fower felds in the novel calls on readers and
critics to retrain our attention beyond inherited colonial (Linnean) taxonomies and
George English Brooks
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anthropocentric (Victorian languages of fowers) tropes and metaphors in order to
reevaluate systems of meaning reliant on ecologically-derived language and symbolic
shorthand.
People of Paper, People of Meat, and the Ecological Uncanny
Te condition of being moved out of ones living knowledge, either through physical
or epistemic displacement, can be seen to account for many of the irrealist aesthetics in
PoP, when from their various perspectives, characters struggle to make sense of their
new lives and home environments in the context of their own lived experience (Nixon
2011: 19). Te simultaneous presence of difering codes within the novel (mythical/
supernatural, rational/empirical) represents a material reality as experienced by these
characters in ways beyond those available to the aesthetics of mimetic realism, using
the mode of magical realism to facilitate the perception of less visible connections
between material practices (late capitalism, globalization, social injustice), spiritual/
ethical concerns [] and the slow but relentless destruction of the earth/environment
(Benito Snchez, Manzanas and Simal 2009: 197). In closing, I would like to examine
more specifcally how magical realism works in this novel to redefne conceptions
of subjectivity against, as Lois Parkinson Zamora has argued more generally, the
ideological limitations of Cartesian (and Freudian) consciousness [and] scientifc
rationalism (1995: 519).
Freuds notion of the uncanny is of particular interest to the ways Plasencias
irrealist aesthetics work within and in defance of rational, realist narrative. Freud
notes that the German word unheimlich is the opposite of heimlich[homely],
heimisch [native] the opposite of what is familiar; that [t]he better orientated in
his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something
uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it; and that an uncanny efect is ofen
and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is efaced
(2001: 931, 946). Te diferent forms of displacement in the novel frequently produce
this sense of the uncanny and register in its aesthetics. However, of even more particular
interest here is the uncanny as it also arises from doubts whether an apparently animate
being [in fction, or perceived in reality] is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless
object might not be in fact animate (935). Freuds analysis attributes the unheimlich
efect of wax fgurines, dolls, and automata to the old, animistic conception of the
universe, suggesting that we experience the uncanny when primitive beliefs which
have been surmounted seem once more to be confrmed (944, 950). Here Freud
inadvertently concedes the instability of distinctions between primitive/animistic
cosmologies and modern/secular ones.
Tis capacity of automata to conjure the uncanny fgures prominently in PoP.
While the novels paper beings (humans and other animals) complicate established
Cartesian human-animal-material distinctions, the presence of mechanical tortoises
further interrogates these distinctions. Federico de la Fe explains that he used to be
from a river called Las Tortugas where turtles were made of meat, not sprockets and
Green Letters Volume 16
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coils (29). But when Federico frst nears the U.S. border, he notices a
vestige from his old home trudging through the gutter. He saw the dome of
a tortoise moving along the side of the road [] Federico de la Fe followed
the tortoise, catching up to it, observing its metallic gleam and hinged tail as
it climbed the steps of an old repair shop where they worked on Japanese cars
and mechanical tortoises. (26)
In Federicos perception of the tortoise as a kind of bizarre reifcation of the Western
epistemological dualism between nature and culture, the novel also demonstrates
what Walter Mignolo has called border thinking or knowledge from a subaltern
perspective (2000: 11). Benito Snchez et al have argued that magical realist narrative
is partly aimed at the explosion of realist epistemology and the deconstruction of
traditional dichotomies such as human versus non-human, nature versus culture
(Benito Snchez, Manzanas, Simal 2009: 5). Whether the mechanical tortoises are read
as representations of real tortoises, imagined tortoises, actual machines, or cyborgs,
their recurrence in the novel draws attention to Cartesian dualisms of the material/
physical and mental/spiritual, and what an economy based on these dualisms, when
they are followed through to their (il)logical ends, does to the body. In this way the
mechanical tortoises are the spectre of the hyper-rational premises of Cartesian reason,
or what Donna Harraway describes as the Wests escalating dominations of abstract
individuation, to the degree that the tortoises enter the domain of the mechanical
(2001: 2270). Te commodifcation of bodies by neoliberal capitalism, treated
elsewhere in the novel (human/labour, plant, material), is reifed in this confation of
animal and machine. (See Figure 2).
When the mechanical tortoises begin to speak in unintelligible binary utterances
of zeros and ones, the Cartesian binary is satirized at its absurd limit, while the
problem of animal subjectivity is foregrounded in a way that emphasizes its opacity
and experiments with non-anthropomorphic alternatives to spoken/written language.
(See Figure 2). Timothy Morton considers one such alternative in his reading of the
re-mark in Charlie Brown cartoons: When the bird Woodstock speaks, we dont
know what he is saying, but we know that he is speaking, because the little squiggles
above his head are placed in a speech bubble, which performs the action of the re-
mark and makes us pay attention to these squiggles as meaningful in some unspecifed
way (2007: 49). Similarly, Plascencias mechanical tortoise is granted a form of speech
which resists translation or glib anthropomorphization, thus rematerializing in
uncanny form the repressed question of nonhuman subjectivity (Wolfe 2003: 1).
George English Brooks
70
Figure 2
Green Letters Volume 16
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Conclusion
For Western ecocritics, the cultural origins of modern Western epistemologies have
too ofen been naturalized, and it is here that such postcolonial critiques of rhetoric,
science and reason ofer an important correction. In return, ecocritical emphases on
the non-human can hold postcolonial discourse more accountable for addressing
colonial diference in the more-than-human world. Te examples explored here
illustrate what John Erickson describes as magical realisms power to rupture the
coherence of the systematized empirical world by revealing it to be not a universally
true or absolute representation of external reality, but only one of several possible
representations (1995: 428). It is through such ruptures that PoP turns the readers
attention to the environment of the book itself, and to the physical properties of its
material form. Te crossed-out words, blacked-out paragraphs, columns, and pages,
and unusual spatial arrangements all construct a textual ecology that deprivileges the
totalizing voice of a single narrator. Instead, the reader frequently opens to two-page
spreads wherein Saturn-Plascencias voice competes with eight or nine others. By
placing Saturn-Plascencias narrative voice within the heteroglossia of the El Monte
community, for instance, such choral passages defy reduction to a single linear story
or history (See Figure 3).
Tis interaction between form and content takes on an additional dimension in
several passages where the name of Saturn-Plascencias white boy rival is literally cut
out of the page, leaving small rectangular windows through the paper (117, 119, 244).
Here the words are not merely crossed out but the material upon which they were
printed has been literally excised, excisions which not only compel our attention to the
physicality of the book, but which also take with them the meanings on the opposite
side of the page. In this way the ecological substance of the book itself is exploited in
order to illustrate the unavoidable interconnectedness of its parts, and the interrelated
efects of their alteration.
Ursula Heise proposes that, because the aesthetic transformation of the real has
particular potential for reshaping the individual and collective ecosocial imaginary,
postcolonial and ecocritical scholars must attend to the way in which aesthetic forms
relate to cultural as well as biological structures (2010: 258). Perhaps nowhere are
these aesthetic considerations better staged in Plascencias novel than in terms of the
physical nature of paper and the materiality of the text. Afer all, PoP begins with
a syncretic creation story that blends Mesoamerican animist cosmology with the
Catholic/Judeo-Christian tradition to recount the origin of the paper cats, turtles,
swans and people that inhabit the novel alongside regular humans who are made
entirely of meat (25). Tese mimetic paper representations of people, along with the
novels other extremely wide-ranging and inventive uses of paper, draw attention to
the common material on which the entire novel is created. From this paper/fctive
world emerge two overarching themes: the marvellous versatility of paper, and its
inescapable status as a transient, impermanent commodity, which has rendered living
trees into abstract resources. Te novel gestures towards its own limitations both in
George English Brooks
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Figure 3
Green Letters Volume 16
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George English Brooks
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the discursive terms of the representational limits of the printed page, and in material
terms as a commodity produced from wood-pulp.
Finally, the novels syncretic (Mesoamerican animist and Judeo-Christian)
cosmology suggests ways in which other Hispanic texts of the Americas might
be read by ecocritics and postcolonialists. Anthropologists have considered the
sacred qualities assigned to paper for example, through anthropomorphic and
theriomorphic (animal-shaped) paper fgures and their ritual uses by past and
contemporary Nahua peoples of Veracruz and Puebla, Mexico, comparing this to the
ways in which Western societies have so surrounded themselves with paper that it
has become background material, scarcely noticed by most of us (Sandstrom and
Sandstrom 1986: 22, 17, 4). Such attention to relationships between the material
ecologies outside of the text, and the aesthetic ones inside, opens many possibilities for
reading Chicana/o, Mexican and other Hispanic literatures of the Americas. Te stories
of the Popol Vuh (sacred text of pre-Columbian Central American story cycles), for
example, relate the various creations of people at diferent periods out of mud, wood,
and corn. Other texts that invite such materialist ecocritical and postcolonial readings
include Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias novel Men of Maize/Hombres de
maz (1949); Oscar Zeta Acostas Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973); Alejandro
Morales Te Brick People (1988); and John Sayles flm Men with Guns/Hombres
con armas (1997), in which the protagonists travel through remote areas of central
America encountering communities identifed simply as sugar people, salt people,
banana people, and cofee people, all sufering various degrees of displacement and
starvation. Like Plascencias novel, such texts invite readings of diferent modes of
representing human and nonhuman subjectivity in relation to the more-than-human
environment, especially as these have been and continue to be mediated by migration
and refugeeism, neoliberal labour, globalization, environmental transformation and
rapidly changing notions of community and survival.
George English Brooks teaches humanities and writing at the University of Nevada.
Before coming to Reno to study in UNRs Literature and Environment Program, George
attended the University of Utah, and directed a countywide adult literacy programme. His
research and teaching interests include ecocomposition, bioregionalism, inter-American
literatures, border studies, postcolonialism, environmental justice, ecocriticism, and
globalization. Georges work has appeared in the journal ISLE, Main Street Rag, Camas:
Te Nature of the West, Sunstone, Hawk and Whippoorwill, and Teaching Sustainability/
Teaching Sustainably.
RvvvnvNcvs
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Publication of Vanderbilt University (1 April). On line at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/english/
nashvillereview/archives/1084
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Barbas-Rhoden, Laura. 2011. Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida.
Bauman, Richard. 1993. Editors Introduction in Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexico
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Comarof, Jean, and John L. Comarof. 2002. Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and
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Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Durham: Duke University Press: 435-58.
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ben Jelloun and Abdelkebir Khatibi in Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Wendy B. Faris (eds)
Magical Realism: Teory, History, Community. Durham: Duke University Press: 427-50.
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of Teory and Criticism. New York: Norton: 929-52.
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Harraway, Donna. 2001. A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism
in the 1980s: An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit
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the Other America: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture. New
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in a Town that Is Constantly in Transition in Los Angeles Times (25 April), E8.
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Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and
Border Tinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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G.vuis .u G.s1vovous: Sv.ci .u Fovm i Su.i Moo1oos
Crvrcs Biooms z1 Nicu1
Kv:v B:nuow
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Postcolonial ecocriticism has granted Shani Mootoos Cereus Blooms at Night frequent
critical attention, due to the novels interposing of human and nonhuman life, its
revision of the naturalisation of colonial and heteronormative hegemony through
representations of gardens, and its tentative celebrations of the queer natures of its
main characters. Tese three strands have attracted a diversity of critical analyses in
this interdisciplinary feld. For example, the depiction of the novels central untended
garden and the way it conceals traumatic violence from the surrounding fctional town
of Paradise on the island Lantanacamara recalls how the collusion of human violence
and natural regeneration obstructs access to history in the postcolonial Caribbean
(DeLoughrey, Gosson, and Handley 2005: 3). Yet even as these tropical environments
may conceal histories of violence, they also serve as sites for collective memory and
artistic reimagining, which provide in their portrayals by writers like Mootoo the
possibility of understanding the relation between ones place and the larger shared
history of the Caribbean region (DeLoughrey, Gosson, and Handley: 26).
Troughout Cereus, access to memory and the fulflment or deferment of desire
is mediated through the natural world, so that acts of exchanging and transplanting
fowers signify underlying colonial histories while images of insects sufuse the plot
and interrupt the printed lines on the page. Of these markers, the cereus plant a
cactus with a redolent, one-night-only bloom becomes the most prominent symbol,
given its appearance in the title and at key points in the text. Leading criticism on
the novel does not fail to observe this point. Sarah Phillips Casteel dubs the cereus
emblematic of the instability of natural landscapes and the fuidity of sexual
identities (2003: 21); John Corr suggests it signifes the establishment of a new and
special network of relationships between the girls, their mothers lover, and their
environment (2005: 84); Vivian May observes how the transplanting of the cereus
invokes diaspora [] that alludes to human migration and exile (2006: 123); and
Mariam Pirbhai considers how the cereus fower becomes the metaphorical corollary,
in nature, of interrelation not as a neatly compartmentalized and spatially bound unit
but a rhizomatic interweaving (2008: 261).
Each of these readings capably addresses important aspects of the novel, yet one
in particular suits this article for its attention to borders. Isabel Hoving provides one
of the most extensive readings of the cereus, fnding it the central token of border-
crossing [] an index of border-crossing (2005: 162-163), a ftting symbol for a cast
of characters who transfer across sexual and geopolitical boundaries. Further, Hoving
notes, Te fact that the cereus is indigenous to this part of the world suggests that
78
ambiguousness is at the heart of the Caribbean (163). Te cereus thus provides rich
analogies for critics to employ as they address the intersections between colonial and
natural history, botany, landscaping, and sexuality.
However, a scene detailing the origins of the eponymous plant in the story features
an additional nonhuman lifeform, which might serve as an alternative focal point
through which to interrogate the novels representation of spaces, queer natures,
and border-crossing. In the novel, Sarahs lover Lavinia, who loved the freedom and
wildness in Sarahs garden, brings two cereus plants for each of Sarahs daughters:
She took them out into the yard and made a production of choosing the best
planting spot. In the roots of one of the cacti was entwined a large, bulbous
periwinkle snail in a gold and buf shell. Pohpoh insisted she must have the shell
for an ornament. Aunt Lavinia held her back from prying the live snail from its
shell, urging her to wait until it died and shed its housing naturally. (2001: 53-54)
Lavinia explains to Pohpoh that if she waits and collects shells afer the snails have died,
the souls of the snails will return to protect her. Pohpoh takes Lavinias idiosyncratic
belief to heart, and it soon becomes a defning credo for her life, while also imbuing
shells with protective meaning. Pohpoh later rescues snails in episodes that function
metonymically as symbols of protection and defense of the vulnerable, including
her younger sister and herself. Meanwhile, rows of snail shells mark physical and
psychic boundaries. Pohpoh grows out of her nickname and becomes the adult Mala
Ramchandin, a survivor of abuse and trauma, sufering in seclusion in her childhood
home. Tis aging Mala obsessively borders her yard with snail shells bleached white
from boiling.
Mala was the frst character Mootoo imagined as the novel took shape, and it was
snails, not cereus plants, that helped her to develop the characters subjectivity, as she
explains in an interview: Te idea for Cereus began with an image [] of an old
woman with wild, unkempt hair, standing over a pot on a stove, steam billowing into
the room as she placed handsful of snail shells into the pot (Shani Mootoo 2000:
112). Snails remain tied to Mala from this inaugural image to the novels publication,
both as a totem for the character and as a trope of the novels major emphases on
borders and protection.
Given the metaphoric potency and the prominence of the cereus plant, it is
understandable that readers might overlook the snail in the passage frst detailing
its origins. Yet snails and their shells are also important markers of border-crossings,
appearing consistently at key moments in the story and in its gardens. Furthermore,
these shell-bearing beings ofer a key insight into the aesthetic form of the novel, in
which Mootoos precise use of analepsis using a complex narratorial persona to
focalize a structured pattern of analeptic episodes reveals a structure that assumes
its own spiralling shell shape.
Given that Cereus has received such a warm invitation among scholars working at
Green Letters Volume 16
79
the intersections of postcolonial and ecocritical studies, it is felicitous that the novel
readily ofers this unique shell-like structure, since postcolonial ecocritical scholars
are beginning to emphasise in their work a renewed or closer attention to formal
aesthetics of texts. Ursula Heise issues an explicit call for more rigorous aesthetic
critique in her Aferword to Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World
Narrative. Heise writes, In the convergence of ecocriticism and postcolonialism []
the way in which aesthetic forms relate to cultural as well as biological structures
deserves our particular attention, especially since aesthetics enable reshaping the
individual and collective ecosocial imaginary (2010: 258). Heise notes a variety of
ways the authors in the collection pursue aesthetic inquiries, including attending to
genre forms, idiom, narrative structures, and troping, as well as tracing connections
between these aesthetic considerations and their historic, material bases.
Similar to Heise, in his Postcolonial Environments, Pablo Mukherjee stresses
the value of aesthetics, beginning with a reallocation of David Harveys historical-
geographical materialism as eco-materialist aesthetics (2010: 18-19). Mukherjee
seeks a historical-materialist approach, adopting Marxist analysis while correcting
anti-materialist trends within it by reasserting how environment is embedded in such
discourse. In his analysis, Mukherjee foregrounds unevenness of cultural development
as a key concept to his eco-materialism and enlists this as a tool to fnd aesthetic value
not in the exotic uniqueness of a cultural form but in the stylistic and formal moves
of texts employing various cultural forms (80).
In the spirit of such turns towards aesthetics, I situate my reading of Mootoos novel
by addressing how its narrative form embeds the traumas and desires of the characters.
In concert with the shell-like narrative structure, interrogating the thematic resonances
of the novels shells and snails further helps interweave postcolonial, ecocritical, and
queer studies. Tis turn to the aesthetic helps yoke together critical methodologies
that might otherwise prove too unwieldy to employ simultaneously. Afer considering
the spiralling, shell-like formal structure of Cereus, I will complement my reading of
narratological boundaries by considering how characters use snails to border spaces
and invoke protection. By refecting the novels interlaced themes in both content and
form, snails and their shells ofer a doubly productive entryway into this intricate
work.
Fashioning a Garment out of Myriad Parts: Shells as Structure
Snails represent borders as much as they do protection, and borders appear everywhere
in Cereus, establishing nations, social groups, and public and private spaces. More
ofen than not, the characters fnd themselves constrained or ostracised by these
demarcations, therefore acutely aware of how these borders operate and where they
fall. Additionally, characters construct their own borders within their narratives and
memories in order to contain trauma and negotiate desire. As they wind together
through space and time, the layering of these memories assumes a shell-like quality.
Shells are themselves composed of borders. For a snail (gastropod), the shell begins
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to form in the larval stage as it secretes complex proteins. Tis becomes the apex of
the shell, or protoconch, while the later, more developed shell of a mature snail is
the teleoconch. Like the rings of a tree trunk, a snail shell thus demonstrates periods
of growth, a record layered upon itself in spiral formation. Obviously, the border of
the shell also protects the snail; most snails additionally possess an operculum that
functions like a lid for the shells aperture.
Te narrative segments and perspectival shifs of Cereus cohere through the image
of a spiral gastropod shell into a unifed structure. Tis form also resonates with other
works of Caribbean literature. Mootoo loosely disguises the novels settings with
fctionalised equivalents: rather than Trinidad, where she grew up, the novel takes
place on Lantanacamara; instead of the UK, Lantanacamaras colonial metropole is
dubbed the Shivering Northern Wetlands. However, the novel is thoroughly Caribbean,
not only in its representation of particular fora and fauna and its colonial past and
neocolonial present, but also in the formal strategies it employs. Considerations of
spiral forms in Caribbean literature have appeared elsewhere, perhaps most notably
in Kaiama L. Glovers Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon.
Glover studies four Haitian artists for their involvement with Spiralism, an ofshoot
of French literary Surrealism that gained a particular following in Haiti. Although
Glover stresses the specifcally Haitian relevance of these writers, she does extend the
spiral to Caribbean literature more generally:
Te very idea of the spiral recalls the foundations of the Caribbean oral
tradition, according to which stories unfold cumulatively or cyclically; are
relatively unconcerned with any purely narrative structure or horizontal, linear
development; and are subject invariably to the frequent and spontaneous
interventions of the public. (2010: viii)
Mootoos novel exemplifes a similar rejection of horizontal, linear development, even if
its narrative structure seems more deliberate than unconcerned, and it is worth noting
how the poetic resonance of the spiral appears in postcolonial Caribbean writing and
theory beyond Haitian Spiralism. As Glover notes, Spiralist aesthetics complement
Edouard Glissants theory of Relation [] Bentez-Rojos repeating island, and Derek
Walcotts interrogation of historical narrative in the Caribbean, among others, [and]
the Spiralists aesthetic philosophy resonates unmistakeably within a tradition of
regional self-creation (xi). Although without adopting the specifc philosophy of the
Spiralists, Mootoo also uses spirals to demonstrate individual and collective trauma in
characters fractured mental states and in the walls of silence erected between members
of Lantanacamaran society. Narratological analysis aligning the narrative windings of
the text with the geometric structure of a shell shows how Mootoos aesthetics inscribe
postcolonial ecocritical themes into the novels structure.
Te main narrator Tyler is well suited to guide us through the bordered spaces
of Cereus, since he is not only a queer character who transgresses heteronormative
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sexual and gender boundaries, asserting that he is neither properly man nor woman
but some in-between, unnamed thing (71), but also because he straddles the line
between autodiegetic and homodiegetic narration. His personal story as a nurse to
Mala Ramchandin entwines with hers: he fnds through his caregiving that his own
life has begun to bloom (105). It entwines narratologically as well: in the opening
lines he explains his self-appointed task of recounting Malas story, and throughout
the text he reminds readers that he is fashioning a garment out of myriad parts (105).
Tylers queerness has also prompted him to cross geographical borders: early in the
novel he describes how he lef Lantanacamara for the Shivering Northern Wetlands
both to study to become a nurse and to fee to a place where his queer efeminacy
would be less noticeable, obscured beneath his more readily apparent ethnicity, either
invisible or of no consequence to people to whom [his] foreignness was what would
be strange (47-48). By completing his nursing training abroad in this metropole, Tyler
crosses further into a foreign society than characters like Malas father Chandin are
ever able to, despite however much Chandin plays the colonial mimic. For all these
reasons, Hoving is right to dub Tyler a border-crosser par excellence (2005: 157).
Tyler transgresses borders with Mala in an earnest desire to publish a faithful
account of her story, hoping that it might reunite her with her long-lost sister Asha. His
sympathetic stance is no guarantee of his accuracy, but his refusal to feign transparency
in conveying Malas narrative is testament to his expertise as a border-crosser. Rather
than pretending he is someone who knows Mala, Tyler continuously foregrounds his
own subjectivity. He admits to gaps and failings in his account and foregrounds how
Malas arrival at the Alms House nursing home has altered his own life and helped to
usher in a love interest. While the shared queerness Tyler senses between himself
and Mala (Mootoo 2001: 48) and his imaginative empathy with her (Warnock 2007:
278) certainly help Tyler access Malas story, he presents a more complex narrative
by maintaining the boundaries between his own subjectivity and Malas even as
his narratives cross them. Furthermore, in crossing but not erasing these narrative
borders and peppering his account with his own stories and with passages directly
addressing Asha, Tylers perspective develops and reveals the spiralling shell of the
narrative structure. In crossing borders, then, Tyler does not diminish or dismiss
them. If anything, his very need to cross them emphasises their reality.
Te patterned frequency and duration of the narrative segments ordering Tylers
narration enables this reading. Te narrative structure can be conceived in three
moves. Te frst involves a simple, two-dimensional image of concentric rings to
represent the framed and framing multilayered narratives (Figure 1). Te outermost
area represents Tylers direct address to Asha, the estranged sister he hopes to reunite
with Mala. Tese passages create a bookend frame and include the frst and last pages
of the novel.
1
Contained within this frame is the narrative present, largely comprised of
Tylers account of his work caring for Mala at the Alms House as well as moments from
the perspectives of Ambrose, Malas former lover, and Otoh, Ambroses transgender
son. Beneath and within the narrative present are two rings of recalled memories, one
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ring featuring the childhoods of Mala and Ambrose (and in which Tyler presents his
own childhood memories of learning about the Ramchandins from his grandmother),
and one ring detailing the history of Chandins youth through Malas childhood when
she was called Pohpoh. Te second move to conceptualise the shell structure requires
adding depth to these rings, allowing each to become a tier descending into the
next. Tis added dimension helps represent the temporality of these accounts, each
going back further in time, emphasising the removes or borders between levels while
maintaining the sense that each level is ultimately fltered through Tylers perspective.
Te fnal move transforms these levels into the tubular shape of a snail shell. Te
tiers become a single, spiralling tube, each level contiguous with the next, the spirals
returning us to particular temporalities and perspectives. Imagining the narrative in
the shape of a spiralling shell makes interpretative sense of the irrealist episode in
the novel in which the character Pohpoh reappears not as Malas recollection of her
own childhood, but as a schizophrenic projection to Mala in the narrative present.
Mala seeks to protect this phantom Pohpoh the way she did her sister Asha when they
were children. When the residents of Paradise fnd Mala at her home in the narrative
present, Mala perceives Pohpoh among them, trying to evade these intruders. Te
narrative progression in this complex, climactic scene is best understood using a
shell as model. Given that the teleoconch is the most recently formed part of a shell,
while the protoconch begins early in the snails life, tracing the shell inwards is thus
also a tracing backwards in time, and can help us imagine the narrative oscillation
that begins to occur when Malas psychic dormancy is disturbed by Otoh and others
crossing into her yard signifcantly, by stepping over the border of snail shells she
has placed there. Up to this point in the novel, the scenes have wound backwards and
forwards between the diferent narrative levels, but as the climax nears they begin to
Figure 1
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oscillate with increasing frequency between the narrative present and memories of
the past. Te destabilised narrative refects the intensifed instability of Malas mental
state as she jostles between a traumatic past and present. Te snail shell thus provides a
formal structure for the representation of psychic trauma, the formation and crossing
of boundaries in memory, and for the simultaneous retrogression and progression of
the narration.
To further clarify this double movement, we could substitute the snail shell for
that of the nautilus, the segmented chambers of which further emphasise the idea of
boundary crossing (see Figure 2). In such a shell, each chamber wall could represent
psychic and physical boundaries erected to block out traumatising phenomena or to
ceremonially represent attempts to repress the past. Tus, an investigation of Malas
trauma requires a reading of this narrative structure as a mirror to her compulsive
building of ornate barricades and walls of furniture that block her from the corpse of
her father locked in a room of the house. Likewise, Malas building of barricades later
at the Alms House can be read as ritualised manifestations of her desire to censor
her memories. In order to reach Mala, Otoh must work his way through the walls
she has constructed, much as the reader must work her way through the segmented,
oscillating narrative structure to recover a fuller story.
2
One fnal visual metaphor helps illustrate the narrative form of the novel: a
crosscut of a gastropod shell creates sections separated by the shells columella that
grow more compact and contiguous the further back one traces the shell. Similarly,
the levels of memory in the novel intertwine with the narrative present and grow more
compact until they reach a breaking point in the text. Tis pattern loosely corresponds
with a movement beyond the total immersion in Tylers narration to the appearance
of the presumably independent voice of Ashas letters, before settling back into
Tylers account of the narrative present of the Alms House garden, where the freshly
transplanted cereus is days away from blooming.
Figure 2
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Just as a literal mapping of the structure benefts a reading of Mootoos aesthetics,
considering the green spaces of the novel, parks, gardens, playgrounds, and yards
so, too, it reveals the mapping of social and sexual boundaries throughout the text,
whether complicit with or resisting colonially infuenced heteronormativity. Here,
snail shells are used not structurally but literally to mark the physical boundaries of
gardens and to invoke protection.
Ever-lengthening Rows of Bleached White Snail Shells: Shells as Symbol
In Cereus, Mootoo engages the management and demarcation of space via gardens
and botanical technologies by setting much of the novels action in a series of green
spaces, each signifying multiple boundaries and borders of race, class, and gender.
Like the structure, which relies on narratological boundaries to represent Malas
traumatised psyche and strategies used to defend it, literal boundaries in the novel are
marshalled for isolation and protection. Boundaries are present throughout but are
perhaps most prevalent in the depiction of the yard at Hill Side, the house Chandin
builds in an underdeveloped section of Paradise (50) and where Mala spends most of
her life. Afer Malas mother Sarah elopes with Lavinia, Chandin fences of the estate
with chicken wire, which remains afer his death, reinforced by Malas ritualistic lining
of the inside of the fence with rows of snails (65).
Taking centre stage in the novel and its criticism, Malas yard-garden has been
productively analysed by several critics. In the recollected memories of Malas
childhood, the garden was once a vibrant place tended by her mother Sarah, where
Lavinia brought the cereus and snail. In the narrative present, however, the garden
becomes a quite diferent space, one the adult Mala uses to close herself of from the
rest of Paradise. Te sensuously evocative yet wild garden resists facile appreciation
or interpretation. Isabel Hoving considers this garden an ambiguous space, the
excessiveness of which [] signifes the unspeakability of the Caribbean condition
(2005: 158), while according to Sarah Phillips Casteel, Malas garden is a space in which
to explore the mutual interdependence of place and displacement, roots and routes
(2003: 13). Tese defnitions refect the trend in Caribbean literature of the recognition
of gardens as potent symbols of colonial domination and colonial resistance. As
DeLoughrey and Handley observe, the garden is ofen seen as a hybrid space of nature
and culture, historicizing the ways in which European colonialism confgured utopian
narratives of foral abundance in a dystopian era of slavery and exploitation (2011:
31). Jill Casid further examines the role of gardens as colonial strategies, arguing that
a central colonial preoccupation of landscaping was to enclose space, and citing the
use of transplanted ornamental species like palm trees to demarcate social boundaries
(2005: 11). Here, botanical species were deployed as an imperial technology that
redefned and arranged physical space to suit colonial enterprises.
Yet species may be marshalled in other ways, as Malas bordering her yard with
snail shells to protect herself indicates. Tis shell border efects Malas seclusion from
the town until Otoh leaps over the fence and lands in the midst of row upon row
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of shells, some whole but mostly all shattered (150). Otohs breaching of this border
encapsulates his multivalent border-crossings. Indeed, he may be second only to
Tyler as the novels foremost boundary-crosser. He too transgresses Lantanacamaras
established gender lines transformed from the young Ambrosia by hours of mind-
dulling exercise and aided by his parents complicity with his male gender expression
(110) and his literal crossing over the shell border into Malas yard also signifes
a stepping across temporal divisions: to Mala, Otoh appears as the young Ambrose,
whose leaving her years ago instigated her seclusion. When Ambrose fees the scene
of Chandins assault and subsequent murder, Mala cries out afer him and is suddenly
struck by its resonance with Chandins crying out years previous when Lavinia and
Sarah eloped: Tere was a bizarre familiarity in the moment [] Long ago. Today
(228). Like a spiral, there is repetition, but with a diference. Like a snail shell, the
temporal borders press ever more tightly against one another, so that the narrative
present, where Otoh resembles his father, becomes harder to distinguish from
preceding layers of memory. Mala has built a refuge that traps her in time as much as
in the space of the yard; crossing its threshold causes chronological disturbances as
much as spatial ones. Te blurring of Ambroses fight with the memory of her father
compels Mala to begin calling out for the fgures of her youth, including Asha and
Ambrose when he was known as Boyie. Te narratives previous scenes featuring these
childhoods are set within other green spaces, wherein demarcated boundaries enable
a mistreatment that foreshadows and precipitates Malas later abandonment. Where
snails appear here, they symbolise protection even as they signal the violence against
which such protection is invoked.
Te schoolyard and El Dorado Park are both spaces where Mala frst experiences
the forms of communal exclusion that enable Chandin to sustain his raping and
beating of her as a girl and young woman and her eventual seclusion in old age,
neglected by Paradises citizens while the town evolves around her. In the novel, it
becomes increasingly clear that the community is aware of Chandins abuse of his
children, perhaps most explicitly demonstrated by the postmans refusal to deliver
mail to Hill Side because he thought it was a place of sin and moral corruption (243).
But however much the citizens of Paradise know about the abuse, they wilfully ignore
this awareness by shifing the blame to the victim. Vivian May provides a crucial
explanation for the communitys exclusion and neglect of Mala through the terms
strategic ignorance and wilful ignorance. With these terms, May concisely details
the operations of social boundaries, which can be grounded in physical borders that
appear in these green spaces and which necessitate the protection associated with snail
shells.
Strategic ignorance refers to a subjects deliberate refusal to see the world in a way
that is oppressive to that subject: Tylers refusal to engage his fellow nurses veiled
mocking of his efeminacy is one example. More acutely, Mala displays strategic
ignorance in a scene of Chandins abuse of her body: Mala deliberately distracts
herself from the pain by focusing instead on the favour on her tongue afer Chandin
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smashes a bowl of stew in her face. Wilful ignorance, on the other hand, refers to the
subconscious, ofen collective perpetuation of oppression via the refusal to confront
or acknowledge it. It is this latter wilful ignorance that explains the communitys
failure to stop Chandin and help Mala. May specifcally attaches this instance of wilful
ignorance to heteronormative oppression by utilising Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks concept
of homosexual panic: [R]ather than help Mala and Asha and question the immorality
of incest and violence against children, the community stigmatizes and taunts them:
instead of protecting the children, they protect the (law of the) father (Trauma 2004:
116). In this heteronormative view, Chandin is blameless because he has sufered
from the horrible discovery of Sarah and Lavinias homosexual relationship. Strategic
and wilful ignorance thus perpetuates boundaries, dividing Mala from the rest of the
community in Paradise so that its citizens occasionally noted the ever-widening, ever-
lengthening rows of bleached while snail shells planted along the inside of her fence
but otherwise ignore her (113). Placing the shells serves as a protective gesture for
Mala yet also signifes the communitys indiference to her, an eccentric woman on the
other side of the shell rows and outside of their concern.
While May astutely explains this aspect of the text, she does not connect the
communitys wilful ignorance to the scenes in El Dorado Park and the schoolyard.
Extending Mays concepts to these scenes reveals how they portray the emergence
of social prejudices in children, who go on to perpetuate wilful ignorance when they
become adults. In one of his acts of narrative boundary-crossing, Tyler recounts Malas
memory of visiting the playground at El Dorado Park as a child (called Pohpoh) with
her sister Asha and Ambrose (then called Boyie). Mala and Asha sneak away from
their sleeping father one morning to go to the park. Pohpoh lists among her days goals
the desire to confront Walter Bissey, a bossy but popular schoolmate who is described
as territorial (82). When Walter arrives with a troupe of children, he initiates a game
that quickly sours into bullying. Walter picks up a stick: With an exaggerated gesture
he drew a line between them and Pohpoh. Ten he stood with his feet wide apart, his
hands on his waist staring at her. Te others formed a line alongside him and imitated
him (87). Tis shames and infuriates Pohpoh. Walter tells Pohpoh the park is only
for good, decent people (87), enlisting the park itself to exclude others. To bolster
his claim about propriety, he would perhaps need only to point out the wrought-iron
railing surrounding the square or the orderliness of the bay-rum trees that sparsely
lined the playground (83).
3
Tis scene thus shows the nascent internalisation of heteronormative values:
evinced by the favour of their jeers, the children have learned that Pohpohs
mothers relationship with another woman is shameful and that accusing someone of
committing certain sexual acts is an ideal form of denigration. Mootoo shows these
children growing up to become members of the community from which Mala isolates
herself, and their behaviours as children fnd their counterparts as adults. For example,
the older Walter Bissey becomes the judge who decides Mala is to be sent to the Alms
House. His ability to declare Malas deviance as mental infrmity and to legislate her
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transferral from one space to another suggests a diferent version of drawing lines, not
to separate bodies on a playground but to delineate them within a social order, to trace
the boundaries of the normative in terms of sanity, sexuality, and criminality.
Soon afer the scene on the playground, Pohpoh and Boyie fnd themselves
observing their schoolmates at recess as if from the other side of a fence (91). Tis
fgurative fence of course recalls Walters boundary-marking in the preceding scene.
Pohpoh and Boyie observe children tormenting and burning insects to death, which
prompts Pohpoh on the following day to collect a colony of periwinkle snails she fnds
in the schoolyard and deposit them safe from harm over the back fence: Pohpoh
believed [killing the snails] would bring down a torrent of bad luck on the boys who
committed it, and she believed good fortune would be visited on a protector of the
snails (92). Pohpoh learned this belief from Lavinia,
4
and her protecting the snails
in this scene mimics the protective role she takes with her sister: Pohpoh repeatedly
pretends to be Asha when Chandin drunkenly calls Asha to his bed. Te adult
Malas placing of snail shells around her yard later seems an invocation of protection
for herself. Tis boundary echoes one Pohpoh draws around an ant in the scene
immediately following the bullying at El Dorado Park. Pohpoh uses chalk to encircle
the ant, and the snail shells Mala uses to line her fence are white as chalk (119). As
Jeanie Warnock shows, Malas fabricated boundaries set out the external limitations
of her world as well as represent the inner circle that her traumatic experiences have
engraved inside her mind (2007: 276). Her refuge becomes less a sanctuary than a
prison as her dementia intensifes in her isolation. Te situation is not much improved
with her relocation to the Alms House until Tyler begins to take her for walks on the
grounds. Tis fnal green space in the novel seems, rather than to reinforce repression
and abuse, to ofer the characters a supportive setting for which to begin to reconcile
the damages of oppression, heal trauma, and restore community: in a sense, to come
out of their shells.
At frst glance, it may be tempting to associate the Alms House merely with
institutionalised repression and containment, especially since soon afer her arrival
Mala is strapped to her bed, and Tyler is passively but perpetually mocked for his
efeminacy by the other nurses. However, the grounds begin to ofer a space in which
characters might begin to subvert this social order. Rather than just an appendage to
a regulatory clinic, the grounds and gardens of the Alms House might best resemble a
heterotopia, which Foucault sees as a kind of efectively enacted utopia in which the
real sites [] are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted (1986: 24).
5
When Tyler frst brings Mala to the garden, he fnds the other residents trying
to introduce themselves and make conversation, happy and curious that there was
someone new to get to know (23). Te fact that people Malas age attempt to interact
with her in this garden afer years of ignoring her in her overgrown yard at Hill Side
suggests the signifcance of this new space. Here too is the site of Malas slow emergence
from her inner world: while perched on the edge of the grounds, Mala imitates a
parrot, and Tyler is delighted to have an indication of her cognisance (23). Tere are
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more references to this edge than there are to the actual landscaping of the grounds.
Te edge is a ftting place for the blossoming attraction between the inveterate border-
crossers Tyler and Otoh. Te frst time Otoh arrives alone at the Alms House, he
struggles to produce a reason for visiting Tyler without the alibi of bringing his father
to visit Mala. Te garden comes to his rescue when he says, [Y]ou could show me
around the grounds if you could spare the time (122). Te two begin to take regular
walks together; Tyler mentions that they would meet away from curious eyes on the
periphery of the grounds (123). Teir walks are not entirely hidden, but when the
Alms House staf spy and gossip about their courting, rather than feel ashamed by the
growing visibility of his queer relationship with Otoh, Tyler relies further upon the
grounds for encouragement: Te gossip mill began to rumble but I listened instead
to the leaves in the trees (248). As characters recreate on the Alms House grounds
they also begin to reposition themselves within the larger community, subverting the
heteronormative hegemony expressed in earlier green spaces that led the children to
bully Pohpoh and the citizens of Paradise to wilfully ignore Mala.
Mr. Hector, the Alms House gardener, best demonstrates this move towards
recuperation. Tyler intrigues him because he reminds Hector of his efeminate brother
Randolph, who was sent away from his family in their youth. Hectors grief about
this loss is evident when he says, I did love him bad! And so many years pass and I
dont even know if he made it through life (73). Meanwhile, Hectors working in the
garden lets him interact with Mala and Tyler in a therapeutic way: Malas presence
compels him to consider how the community has treated her and to think about his
own role in their complacency, while his interactions with Tyler as they discuss and
plant fowers allow him to overcome the habitual wilful ignorance of his community,
as shown when he says to Tyler, I was watching you and I want to ask you so many
questions but I dont even know what it is I want to know. I want to know something
but I dont know what (74).
Hectors uncertainty suggests the widening of concern for previously excluded
members of his community and repeats in the novels fnal scene, in which he wishes
his brother could have met Tyler and Otoh (248). While far from implying an erasure
of past violence or a utopian future, this last scene does convey a sense of expectancy
and hope: that Tyler and Otohs relationship will fourish, that Asha will return and
Mala will continue to recover, and that the newly transplanted cereus will blossom,
continuing its legacy of border crossing pointed out by critics like Hoving. Tis
waiting pairs with the waiting Tyler and Mala experience on visiting days, when they
dress especially for Otoh and Ambrose, Mala ofen wearing a garland of snail shells
about her neck (247). No longer forming an enclosing circle defensively cutting her
of from the world, the shells encircle Mala as an ornament implying she has begun to
receive the good fortune promised for protecting snails.
While in this scene the cereus once more assumes its prominence, considering
snails and shells enriches the understanding of how diferent forms of domination
through generations manifest in both narratological and literal borders. Te Alms
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House garden as heterotopia is a confuence of borders juxtaposing in a single real
space several spaces (Foucault 1986: 25-26). A winding, spiral shell remains a helpful
image by demonstrating how, rather than forming any facile linear progression,
the stories and lives of these characters are more complex, always returning to the
past. Postcolonial ecocritics investigate similar complexity in literature when they
complement readings of a texts representations by analysing the structures and spaces
of its aesthetics.
Kyle Bladow is a PhD student in the Literature & Environment program at the
University of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches in the Core Writing and Core Humanities
programs. He has also served as assistant book review editor for the journal ISLE:
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. He received his BA and MA in
English from Northern Michigan University, completing a thesis on bioregional literature
of the southern shoreline of Lake Superior. At UNR, his dissertation project pursues
the intersections of American Indian studies and ecocriticism within contemporary
environmental literature. His other research interests include queer ecology and material
ecocriticism.
ENuNo1vs
1. Beyond Tylers narration is the text of Ashas letters to her sister Mala, presented near the end
of the novel.
2. Malas obsession with boundaries is not limited to their construction: when she was younger
she would sneak out of her home and into other houses in Paradise. She fnds in these feats of
daring that neither fence nor hedge is too great a challenge (151).
3. Te park is later shown as a popular spot for proper courtship. On a date, Otohs girlfriend
Mavis wants to head there, since it is a nice place to sit and enjoy the evening [] the place to
go, and when Otoh tries to persuade her to go instead to Malas yard to savor the rare bloom
of the cereus, she objects, everybody else going to the love garden in El Dorado Park [] I
dont too much consider that yard to be romantic (136). Tis exchange highlights further the
investment of green spaces with social norms.
4. Mootoo suggests this is a personal belief and does not connect it to any larger spiritual
traditions. One use of snail shells in the Caribbean is the practice of dilogn, a divination in
Santera using cowry shells (Fernndez Olmos 2011: 252).
5. Following Foucaults defnition, the grounds are a heterotopia twice over, belonging as they
do to a retirement home, a site on the borderline between the heterotopia of crisis and the
heterotopia of division (25), while also a garden, a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia
since the beginnings of antiquity (26).
Many thanks to Sharae Deckard, whose insightful comments and suggestions guided this article
through several revisions, and to Erin James, whose unprecedented and engaging graduate
seminar Te Postcolonial Ecocritical Dialogue at the University of Nevada, Reno originally
inspired it.
Kyle Bladow
90
RvvvnvNcvs
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New York University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1986. Of Other Spaces (tr. Jay Miskowiec) in Diacritics 16(1): 22-27.
Glover, Kaiama L. 2010. Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Heise, Ursula. 2010. Aferword: Postcolonial Ecocriticism and the Question of Literature in
Roos, Bonnie and Alex Hunt (eds.) Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World
Narratives. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press: 251-258.
Hoving, Isabel. 2005. Moving the Caribbean Landscape: Cereus Blooms at Night as a Re-
imagination of the Caribbean Environment in DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, Rene K. Gosson,
and George B. Handley (eds.) Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature
and Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press: 154-168.
May, Vivian. 2006. Trauma in Paradise: Willful and Strategic Ignorance in Cereus Blooms at
Night in Hypatia 21(3): 107-135.
Mootoo, Shani. 2001 [1996]. Cereus Blooms at Night. New York: Perennial.
. 2000. Shani Mootoo: An Interview with Lynda Hall in Journal of Lesbian Studies 4(4): 107-
113.
Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. 2010. Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture, and the
Contemporary Novel in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pirbhai, Mariam. 2008. An Ethnos of Diference, A Praxis of Inclusion: Te Ethics of Global
Citizenship in Shani Mootoos Cereus Blooms at Night in Ty, Eleanor and Christl Verduyn
(eds.) Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press: 257-265.
Warnock, Jeanie E. 2007. Soul Murder and rebirth: Trauma, Narrative, and Imagination in
Shani Mootoos Cereus Blooms at Night in Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis (ed.) Adventures of
the Spirit: Te Older Woman in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Other
Contemporary Women Writers. Columbus: Te Ohio State University Press: 270-298.
Green Letters Volume 16
Boox Rivi iws
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As the Humanities curriculum develops to include ever more courses in ecocriticism,
there is an attendant need to renegotiate teaching techniques and assessment methods
which are ft for the purpose of truly engaging students with the reality of the pressing
issues which these courses address. In previous papers on ecocritical pedagogy,
Greg Garrard has put his fnger on a central problem in teaching the environmental
humanities: that it is all too easy for students to show understanding and insight in the
classroom about the complex problems we face, while leaving these lessons behind at
the end of the hour. Te culture in which the students and their teachers live, is
one of commodifcation and consumption. Alternative viewpoints, from a wide range
of theoretical positions, expressed using a range of innovative pedagogical techniques,
are needed to challenge the attitudes students have learned to emulate and inhabit from
their early years. Instructors must fnd a means to provide what Garrard describes in
his introduction as a progressive pedagogy in which the keynote of student-centred
learning is responsibility rather than entitlement.
To this end, Garrard has assembled a formidable pedagogical posse, all of whom
are active practitioners with long-running courses, to address three central issues
which pose challenges to ecocritical pedagogy: interdisciplinarity, matters of scale, and
strategies for engaging with non-literary media. Within each of these three sections,
contributors address their theme using a particular theoretical position or issue (Erin
James deals with the Postcolonial/Ecocritical Dialogue, for example, while Adrian
Ivakhiv discusses teaching ecocriticism and cinema, and Timothy Morton gives a
characteristically charming lesson on why deconstruction with a contemplative heart
is just the ticket).
Contrasting chapters by Richard Kerridge and Anthony Lioi are compelling
in their treatment of very diferent traditions of thought and types of material.
Kerridge provides a timely refection on the purpose of ecocritical literary scholarship,
reaching back to Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis before working his way back to
confront contemporary dichotomies. Lioi, meanwhile, emphasises the value of new
media, criticising academic attachment to works of high culture, stating: it has been
a strategic disaster to dismiss an area of cultural production that is now fooded with
Gvic G.vv.vu, iu., io1i, Trzcuic Ecocvi1icism zu Gvrr
Cci1cvzi S1cuirs, B.sics1oxi, P.icv.vi M.cmiii.
Dnv:u Bon1nw:cx
A1uov N.si, io11, Wovus or Rr-rcuz1mr1: Wvi1ics o
S1ovv1riiic, Mv1u, zu Ecoiociczi Drsivr, S1voUu, Awi
Pn1n:cx Ccnnv
92
environmental discourse.
Several of the essays focus on the particular location in which courses are being
taught, displaying attentiveness to what Elizabeth Giddens calls the social nature
of environmental issues and addressing context as a key constituent in motivating
students thinking. Constructivism becomes a tool for forms of engaged activism in
essays by Giddens and Adrienne Cassel, while Ursula K. Heise and Kevin Hutchings
discuss ways of engaging students with connections to places and ecologies of which
they have no direct experience .
Te book demonstrates an ambitious approach, addressing the expanding range
of ecocritical concerns specifcally second-wave themes such as race, class and
ecocosmopolitanism while maintaining acute attention to the means by which
such issues might be addressed in the Humanities classroom. Dovetailing depth with
practicality, Garrards collection is a valuable intervention in ecocritical pedagogy,
helping to defne contemporary teaching styles, but also to suggest future developments
to a wider constituency of colleagues who are hungry to develop their feld in the
classroom, while using stimulating methods to engage their students directly.
For anyone interested or involved in all three of the subjects mentioned in the subtitle,
this is a book they should read. To be sure, that means a tiny number of people in the
contemporary modern world. However, if we construe storytelling as the narrativity
that remains central to virtually all art and media that use words, its importance and
extent becomes clearer. Furthermore, most such stories are arguably mythic in that,
in various ways and to varying extents, their characters and situations invoke a more-
than-human dimension.
Taking the next step of linking mythic storytelling with ecological desire narrows
the books overall scope further, but hardly the importance of the subject. With the
ever-increasing ecocrisis in mind, compare the availability of stories that ofer success
through the exercise of competitive, individualist, masculinist and anthropocentric
power on the one hand, with that of stories suggesting the possibility of fulflment
through cooperative, communal, feminist and ecocentric behaviour. So Nansens
attempt to get to grips with how to encourage the latter is very welcome.
In doing so, he recognises a couple of fundamental conundrums. One is that in
order to become more infuential in broad cultural and social terms, it would seem
that such storytelling needs to increase in scale and, well, power. But that would put
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it increasingly in the hands of the very people and institutions with a strong vested
interest in protecting the status quo. I dont think there is a solution; only the hope
that through hard work and luck, good-quality, progressive storytelling on an intimate
scale will become more common, thus working largely under the mainstream radar
but no less efectively for that.
Te other dimculty is the tension between any art that ofers itself in the service of
an end, no matter how worthy, and its integrity as art. Nansen does grapple with this
question, and again, although his suggestion to embrace the paradox (95) is not a
solution as such, it is dimcult to think of a better one.
Te less good news is that Nansen doesnt go as deeply into myth, ecological desire,
or even storytelling as each one deserves. I would ofer the following brief suggestions.
Stories are not imagined and projected or draped over the physical landscape (6),
nor do they express the contents of the unconscious (19). Tese are damaging and
unnecessary concessions to the anti-ecological split between matter and spirit (later
mind) initiated by Plato and radicalised by Descartes. As David Abram among others
argues, stories are in our minds, in our bodies and in the land. Really, how could it be
otherwise?
Here and elsewhere, Nansen shows a residually anthropocentric understanding
of myth which betrays his own intentions. An indispensable corrective is Sean Kanes
Wisdom of the Mythtellers (1998); I have found no better, or indeed other. Relatedly,
Joseph Campbells one-size-fts-all monomyth of the human hero, along with its Star
Wars brat, is a travesty of myths ecocentric plurality and complexity.
Finally, metaphor is at the heart of this story. Tere is no such thing as merely
[a] metaphor of something in the world we know (155). We only ever know the world
as something which is to say, metaphorically and that is the very source of the
tremendous potential power of story itself.
Patrick Curry
Rov Nixo, io11, Siow Vioircr zu 1ur Evivomr1ziism or
1ur Poov, Louo, H.vv.vu Uivivsi1v Pviss
L.Uv. Wvicu1, io1o, Wiiurvrss i1o Civiiizru Suzvrs: Rrzuic
1ur Pos1coioizi Evivomr1, Louo, Uivivsi1v oi Giovci.
Pviss
Snnnnv Dvcxnnu
94
Rob Nixons Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is a major intervention
in postcolonial environmental criticism, likely to become a classic in the feld. If
Nixon previously critiqued the fssures between postcolonial studies and ecocriticism,
here he expertly taps the conceptual resources of each to formulate powerful new
frameworks through which to read the politics of environmental justice in literature.
Chief amongst these is the books innovative concept of slow violence. Nixon argues
that in contrast to immediate, spectacular forms of violence explosions, natural
disasters, military attacks environmental degradation more ofen manifests as non-
spectacular, occluded forms that accrue over long periods of time: as biomagnifcation,
toxic drif, genetic mutation, or anthropogenic climate change. Slow violence
produces both environmental refugees and the stationary dispossession which Nixon
calls displacement without movement, destroying land and resources and leaving
communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it
inhabitable (19).
Temporality is central to Nixons formulation of slow violence, since the
generational afer-efects of war and industrial pollution persist long afer the original
events, producing landscapes of temporal overspill that elude rhetorical cleanup
operations with their sanitary beginnings and endings (8). Critiquing the ethics of
proximity, Nixon argues for a shif from critical emphasis on space to analysis of
the temporalities of place (18), considering environmental violence not merely as
a contest over space, or bodies, or labor, or resources, but also over time (8). For
Nixon, this is to formulate new notions of causation and agency (11); to interrogate
the post in postcolonial, postindustrial, post-Cold War, and post-confict (8); and to
consider multiple, ofen-conficting temporalities, particularly the contrast between
turbocapitalism and slow environmental degradation (11).
Addressing another epistemic gap the American academys failure to theorize
the environmental impacts of late capitalism or of US foreign policy the book
demonstrates a salutary focus on the depredations of neoliberalism and petro-
imperialism, examining transnational contexts of structural violence (10). Troughout
seven chapters ranging impressively from Iraq, the Middle East, and India to Nigeria,
Kenya, and South Africa, Nixon exposes the violent geographies produced by the
Green Letters Volume 16
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international division of labour and commodity extraction. His critique is accompanied
by a passionate commitment to politics of resistance throughout the global South the
resource rebellions and environmentalism of the poor as represented in the narrative
imaginings of writer-activists (15).
Nixons book is refreshingly original in its focus on the representational possibilities
of politically engaged non-fction by writer-activists such as Wangari Maathai, Ken
Saro-Wiwa, Arundhati Roy or Indra Sinha, who launch environmental movements
and speak for them, or who amliate themselves with existing struggles and serve
as transnational go-betweens and amplifers (23). Warning against the tendency
of criticism to displace social agency onto idealized literary forms, Nixon argues
instead for a methodology which underscores how writer-activists draw on literatures
testimonial capacities in order to engage nonliterary forces for social change and
which examines form in relation to questions of amliation (32). Nixon links the task
of both critic and writer to the problem of apprehension, suggesting that to engage
slow violence is to confront layered predicaments of apprehension: to apprehend
to arrest, or at least mitigate ofen imperceptible threats requires rendering them
apprehensible to the sense through the world of scientifc and imaginative testimony
(14). Te lucidity of Nixons own prose, which remains powerfully accessible without
sacrifcing scholarly rigour, is testament to his commitment to criticism as worldly
intervention.
Laura Wrights Wilderness into Civilized Shapes is also located at the intersection
of postcolonial studies and ecocriticism, although it is more traditional in its focus
on literary fction, specifcally on how postcolonial novels represent landscapes
and environmental issues within the realm of the imaginary. While Wright does
not propose an overarching new theoretical framework, her book is signifcant for
its advocacy and sensitive practice of a broad-ranging comparativism. Te books
impressive range includes texts from South Asia, New Zealand, Canada, the United
States, South Africa, and Kenya. Tis inclusion of North American texts transcends
the strictly postcolonial to take on the contours of a transnational approach, while the
examination of African texts redresses the overemphasis in postcolonial ecocriticism
on South Asian texts and opens up new terrains of analysis. Although texts already
well-represented in ecocritical discourse are discussed here, such as Arundhati Roys
Te God of Small Tings, Yann Martels Life of Pi, and J. M. Coetzees Disgrace, Wright
also includes texts which have been marginalized or barely examined within an
ecocritical approach, including Ngg wa Tiongos Petals of Blood, Sindiwe Magonas
Mother to Mother, and Flora Nwapas Efuru.
Te books four chapters examine environmental justice concerns in conjunction
with clusters of literary texts, including the creation of wildlife preserves and
concurrent displacement of indigenous peoples; animals rights, extinction and
vegetarianism; water privatization and megadams, indigenous vs. settler conceptions
of the environment; and the impact of ecotourism and deforestation on indigenous
communities. Of particular interest is Wrights fourth chapter, which adeptly positions
Sharae Deckard
96
As ecocritics emerge fully fedged among early modern literature specialists, our
understanding of Renaissance pastoral is refned and made more complicated, beyond
the stereotype of the reductive, escapist idyll. Details of context and textual analysis of
the pastoral mode are at the centre of both these books, although they take diferent
directions and arrive at very diferent places. Both provide evidence of concerns
about environmental issues in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Deforestation,
fen drainage, smoke pollution, urban sprawl and famine due to volatile weather all
led to debates about forms of conservation and sustainability that lie behind the
contemporary literature. Both authors seek to counter common readings of canonical
texts and both take a broad view of the period rather than being dependent upon a
small number of core texts.
Borliks argument is that the texts of this period can act as foils for our own debates,
as in his claim that Spensers mobilisation of Dame Nature might enable ecocritics
to refect upon the benefts and pitfalls of James Lovelocks Gaia hypothesis (11).
In this manner he connects Sir Philip Sidneys Old Arcadia, via Merleau-Ponty, to
environmental anxieties about the over-exploitation of forests; A Midsummer Nights
Dream, via Lynn Whites attack on Puritan disenchantment of nature, with climate
change in the 1590s; Spenser and Milton, via the New Historicism of Louis Montrose,
to the air pollution of sea-coal burning; As You Like It, via republican political theory,
to anti-hunting vegetarianism. Finally he proposes a more historically informed
appreciation of ecocriticism as a contemporary version of pastoral (13). Borlik
wants to position ecocriticism as itself a kind of complex pastoral, harnessing its
staying power as the radical nostalgia for voices of dissent (209). Such an argument
demands the reassessment of pastoral by dismissive British ecocritics (amongst whom
he includes myself, not having found my book titled Pastoral and its notion of the
post-pastoral), the evidence for which is amply provided here.
Ki Hii1iv, io11, Wuz1 Eisr is Pzs1ovzi Rrzisszcr Li1rvz1cvr
zu 1ur Evivomr1, I1uic., Coviii Uivivsi1v Pviss
Rouu A. Boviix, io11, Ecocvi1icism zu Ezviv Mourv Li1rvz1cvr:
Gvrr Pzs1cvrs, Avicuo, RoU1iiuci
Tvnnv G:vvonu
the work of Keri Hulme, Sindiwe Magona, and Flora Nwapa in light of postcolonial
ecofeminism, exploring both the possibilities and the complications that such a
theoretical approach ofers. In all, this book represents a valuable contribution to the
emerging feld of postcolonial environmental criticism.
Green Letters Volume 16
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Ken Hiltners What Else is Pastoral? makes a similarly radical suggestion based
upon his notion that we have largely neglected gesture while endlessly theorising and
making a fetish of representation (21). Hiltner is concerned that because Renaissance
poetry is not replete with the sort of lush descriptions of the environment that we
have come to expect from later writers it may be regarded as lacking environmental
awareness (9). His argument is a refexive one: by gesturing away from the countryside
to focus apparently upon the urban or the architectural, that which is missing is also
implicitly invoked, thereby performing a pastoral function, with such texts having,
furthermore, an environmental component (67). For Hiltner a preoccupation with
mimesis as the defning element of nature writing has blinded ecocritics to what else
is pastoral in the Renaissance. Chapters on Air Pollution in Early Modern London
and Environmental Protest Literature of the Renaissance lead to Empire, the
Environment, and the Growth of the Georgic. Te latter, in particular, is typical of
the radical rethinking demanded by both these challenging extensions of ecocritical
achievement.
Tivvv Giiiovu, io11, Gvrr Voicrs: Uurvs1zuic Co1rmvovzvv
Nz1cvr Por1vv, iu Eu, No11icu.m, Cvi1ic.i, CUi1Uv.i .u
CommUic.1ios Pviss
Mn11nvw Jnnv:s
Originally published by Manchester University Press in 1995, Terry Gifords Green
Voices was subsequently hailed as a keystone in the development of a distinctively
British ecocriticism, as the quotation from Jo Rawlinson on the back of this new
edition of the book makes clear. Te premise of the book is very straightforward: to
consider the work of a range of contemporary poets, from the archipelago of Britain
and Ireland, in terms of how such material engages with the notion of nature in general
and questions to do with the pastoral tradition in particular. Incidentally, the current
volume is perhaps less a second edition than it is a re-issue with a new introduction:
as Giford makes clear at the end of the latter, the text of the original book is ofered
here unchanged.
Te new introduction is a typically energetic piece of writing. Giford notes the
continuing battle against being seen to write nature poetry that he suggests has
been taken up by new British ecocritics in which context he particularly cites the
work of myself (on poetry from Wales) and Louisa Gairn (whose focus is Scotland).
Giford engages with our own critiques of Green Voices in a most generous spirit,
although he takes no prisoners in his rebuttals. He is also not averse to a sly dig at those
who have taken him on: Edna Longleys response to Green Voices changed its authors
Matthew Jarvis
98
name to Terence Giford. Seemingly piqued by this, Giford himself responds here
to the critiques ofered by one Etna Longley. But this introduction is perhaps most
valuable for its attempts to engage with new directions amongst those he broadly dubs
ecopoets. (Whether the writers in question would welcome being included under such
a heading is an interesting question; as a parallel example, although Giford calls me
an ecocritic, I would not adopt such a self-description.) Tus, he points to the work of
various now-signifcant voices such as Kathleen Jamie, John Burnside, Alice Oswald,
and Harriet Tarlo. He notes the fourishing of poetry that is scientifcally informed,
[] tak[ing] ecopoetry into direct confrontation with our ecological crisis, and cites
David Morley as the leader in this particular feld of poetic enquiry. And he is alert to
the very newest voices, suggesting that the frst collections of Will Stone, Kelly Swain
and Hugh Dunkerley show green shoots of promise for the future of ecopoetry:
each of these writers, says Giford, is innovative whilst confrming the ancient role of
nature poetry in the modern mode of ecopoetry.
I thought that Gifords new introduction was a fascinating and extremely
illuminating piece of writing. Perhaps, however, it showed up the original book for
being a little more foursquare. For all its undeniably ground-breaking qualities and it
remains a must-read in this sense Green Voices does, at times, seem too willing to herd
the poetry it considers into what are efectively approved and not approved categories,
with rather a lot of fnger-wagging in the process. Does the work in question engage
with nature in terms of a multi-layered response to its cultural embedding and a rich
awareness of the practical detail of the unpastoral reality that is being written about?
Yes? Ten, good. (And Giford is, at times, wonderful on those poets in whom he sees
such achievement.) If not, then not so good. Tus, for example, Hilary Llewellyn-
Williams is told that her blind anger at fgures of authority simply will not do. Tis
sort of approach seems to promote ecocriticism as a sort of green policing of what is
permitted in a literary work, and I think it should be resisted. Tis grumble to one
side, however, if you havent already read Green Voices, you should: it is an absolutely
key part of the history of environmentally directed literary critique in Britain.
Green Letters Volume 16
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Axii Goouvouv .u K.1i Ricvv, Eus, io11, Ecocvi1iczi Turovv:
Nrw Ecvovrz Avvvozcurs, Cu.vio11isviiii, Uivivsi1v oi
Vivcii. Pviss
Auv::Nv JonNs-Pc1nn
As Kate Rigby and Axel Goodbody rightly suggest in their introduction to this volume,
the alleged ecocritical antipathy to theory is on the wane (1). Goodbody and Rigbys
collection joins the growing ranks of theoretical interventions in environmental
criticism, not just adding in terms of quantity, but signifcantly contributing in terms
of quality. Te introduction is a lucid and judicious review of the vexed relationship
between theory and ecocriticism. Following this, an impressive rank of critics
grapples with the ecological implications of a selection of European critical thought.
In essays by Timothy Morton, Catriona Sandilands, and others, the usual suspects
of environmental philosophy, for example, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond
Williams, are joined by thinkers not readily associated with environmentalism,
such as Adorno, Benjamin, Levinas, and Kristeva, and by lesser-known names, for
example, Gernot Bhme, Norbert Elias, and Pierre Nora. A real coup for the editors is
the original essay from Luce Irigaray, the translation specially commissioned for this
volume.
Te volume proceeds through fve sections, dealing with, for example, Memory
and Politics and Ethics and Otherness. By and large, each essay takes a comparable
approach, introducing or unearthing ecological pertinent aspects of a given philosopher
and then demonstrating the applicability of such thought to environmental discourse,
whether to a literary text or to the environmentalist imaginary more loosely defned.
Far from producing a sense of repetition, this has the efect of a pleasing consistency,
bearing out apparently efortlessly the editors stated objectives.
While virtually all the essays are strong in their rigorous development of
philosophical thought into ecocritical praxis, there are stand-out contributions
that go further, using theoretical insights to challenge some cherished ecocritical
assumptions. Tus, for example, Sandilands incisively reads Benjamins extraordinary
Passagen-Werk, which not just in its argument, but in its very form embodies a
cultural critique of modernity as a constellation of commodities. For Sandilands, such
a critical mode alerts us to the ubiquity of capitalist cultural formation, and, more
importantly, to the nature writers (not to mention the ecocritics) complicity in the
commodifcation of nature. Similarly, Hannes Bergthallers analysis of social systems
theory delivers something of a wake-up call to environmental criticism. Bergthaller
highlights sociologist Niklas Luhmanns theory of social systems as autopoietic or
functionally diferentiated. Tat is, he emphasises that systems such as law, politics,
religion and, one might add, literature, perform specifc and distinct social functions,
Adeline Johns-Putra
100
each of which constructs its own reality and is unable to afect or control the others.
What this means for ecocriticism is the relinquishment of the more ambitious
socio-political aims of the movement, for society, made up as it is by its functionally
diferentiated bits, can never be known fully and is essentially beyond rational control
(226). For Bergthaller, the ecocritic is a second-order observer, who can read texts and
write about them, not campaign for new environmental legislation or plug tailpipes
(227).
Tese and many other insights in this volume push the bounds of the feld. Tis
is, as a result, an important book, not just in terms of the rapprochement between
environmental criticism and theory, but for what it says about the practice (and
theory) of environmental criticism itself.
In this superb book, Timothy Clark has achieved what the best introductions for
students achieve: brief, accurate and readable summaries of the main positions in a
feld, combined with a series of provocative and stimulating questions to be explored
in class. Clark has done this and more he has written a book that any ecocritic should
read, since as well as setting out the central dilemmas with a rare clarity and sharpness,
it asks searching questions that challenge some of ecocriticisms most established
positions. Some of these questions Clark has also explored in recent articles.
1
He is an
important new voice in ecocriticism.
Tough he is in the process of making a major contribution to ecocritical
thinking, and examines the implications of environmental problems with formidable
seriousness, Clark writes somewhat as a critic examining ecocriticism from the outside.
He appraises it, at times impressed, and at times surprised especially by the failure
of some ecocritics to fnd their subject sumciently disconcerting and destabilising. His
primary purpose is not to provide a systematically linear history of the movement.
Instead and this gives the book a certain jerkiness he presents a series of topics,
thirteen quandaries, and numerous open questions. Tere are four sections, on
Romanticism, literature and politics, relations between literature and science, and the
meaning of animals; each has a brief introduction followed by a string of chapters, in
which Clark presents examples of ecocriticism and environmental literature. Tese
he invites the reader to consider quite openly; his concern here is not to bring his
own critical responses to any sort of solid fnality. Rather, he wants to ask questions
and register his own responses as being in the process of formation, an approach that
Timo1uv Ci.vx, io11, Tur Czmnviucr I1voucc1io 1o Li1rvz1cvr
zu 1ur Evivomr1, C.mvviuci, C.mvviuci Uivivsi1v Pviss
R:cnnnu Kvnn:uov
Green Letters Volume 16
101
refects his sense of environmental matters as multi-faceted, contradictory (too fast
and too slow, too large and too small) and ever-shifing. Ecocriticism, in response,
has to be nimble and subject to constant adjustment. It has to be strong enough in
its values to be fexible and open. Clarks combination of clarity with provisionality
of thinking makes for unusually lively writing, and is consistent with his earlier work
as an enthusiastic interpreter of Heidegger (in another excellent Introduction) and a
theorist of the importance of the singularity of each literary work.
Open questions abound in this book. Occasionally with the wittiest and most
teasing of them one wishes he would follow-up a bit more, with his own account of
their implications. He quotes a passage by the nature writer Mark Cocker, a description
of a Cuckoo Pint. Before the passage, Clark asks:
in what ways would this passage lose in efect, quality and interest if no such
plant existed and Cocker had invented the whole thing?
Afer it, he asks again:
in what ways would this passage gain in efect, quality and interest if no such
plant existed and Cocker had invented the whole thing? (44)
One can imagine the class discussion; in fact one can hardly wait to be part of it,
which is perhaps why it is frustrating when the chapter then breaks of. What is Clarks
answer? He refrains from giving it, so that we will have to think of our own, but in a
classroom and at such moments in the book one feels something like the electricity of
a really good class discussion, with its rapidity of movement and surprising questions
and answers the teacher would eventually join in. A slightly diferent efect comes
with this one:
Bearing in mind such issues as the mass extinction of non-human life and the
probable deaths of many millions of people, how honestly certain is it which of
the following two statements is fnally the more responsible:
Climate change is now acknowledged as a legitimate and serious concern
and the government will continue to support measures to improve the fuel
emciency of motor vehicles.
Te only defensible relationship to have with any car is with a well-aimed
brick. (74-75)
Te fantasy image in that second statement seems to express Clarks personally angry
frustration with our collective inability to take the threat seriously. It is good that an
academic book fnds a moment to register that frustration in emotional terms, and in
Richard Kerridge
102
a way it is appropriate here for the chapter to end immediately, giving the statement
some empty space in which to reverberate. In a small way, this ellipsis represents
the impasse we all confront. Tough Clarks book came out last year, it was written
before the recent phase in which people wishing to dismiss climate change have had
considerable success, through misrepresentation of climategate, in popularising the
idea that the whole concern is a deceitful scam perpetrated by the international
climate science community. Clark was writing before this campaign had gathered
strength, but it is a prime and possibly tragic example of something he describes well
the rapidly shifing nature of environmental debate.
A central quandary he identifes is that environmentalism needs to be a vision of
extraordinarily far-reaching practical and cultural transformation so challenging is
the crisis to the fabric of our ordinary lives but also frequently needs to argue in less
ambitious and frightening terms:
To campaign about more fundamental issues such as the evils of
anthropocentrism, the arrogance of humanism or the stupidity of an endless
pursuit of economic growth would be merely to alienate many allies. In order
to be heard at all, campaigners must speak in terms accepted within the existing
structures of governance and economics, the very things they may consider
ultimately responsible for environmental degradation in the frst place. (77)
Among books of literary theory, Clarks is unusual in respecting both the radical vision
and the pragmatic art of compromise and adaptation. He knows that it is far from
enough to diagnose the underlying conceptual problems and their history, and make
disruptive and dimcult new theoretical moves. Clark takes environmental problems
too seriously to be content with that.
But he does not underestimate the scale of the conceptual changes, and changes
in everyday assumptions, that are needed to produce practical change or perhaps
will emerge as a result of enforced changes to ordinary life. Many ecocritical
theorists recently, in diferent felds of study, from posthumanism and biosemiotics
to the material-discursive and Timothy Mortons Darwinist ecological thought, have
converged on the idea that environmentalism in its mature conceptual form brings
us to an account of material reality that resembles the poststructuralist idea of how
selmood is produced continuously. Derridas rejection of the metaphysics of presence
fnds confrmation in the new materialism. Tis is Clarks view too, and he expresses it
without needing heavy terminology:
At stake is the now dominant liberal humanist conception of the human self,
that of a seemingly pre-given, personal, unique identity, a realm of unshakeable
privacy, centre of its own world of values, perceptions, beliefs, commitments
and feelings. Such a conception of the I now seems self-evident to many
people. It is crucial to that possessive individualism pervading modern culture
Green Letters Volume 16
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and markets: ones self becomes something to be more truly discovered,
cultivated, developed and protected, so that life becomes a kind of project of
self-creation and enhancement, and so forth. (65)
In place of that conception of the I, these various sorts of ecocritical theory
conceptualise selmood as a set of efects continuously produced by system, semiotic
exchange and the mesh. For Clark the Heideggerean, it is not a new idea that selmood
is always a matter of unbounded relations, always already in process, and such an
idea makes rigid distinctions between nature and culture untenable: hence the now
ubiquitous natureculture. But what are the practical consequences of thinking in
these terms? Clark writes eloquently about the new sense of scale demanded of us by
ecological problems the way in which tiny unconsidered actions such as leaving lights
on are implicated in unimaginably large consequences. It is a bizarre derangement
of scales, collapsing the trivial and the catastrophic into each other (136). Tis has
consequences, necessarily, for literary representation. Novelistic plots of a conventional
kind and dramas of heroism, self-sacrifce and character development can scarcely
be constructed out of these tiny actions. What are the stories we can now tell? As
yet there are few examples of new literary forms devised to allow these specifcally
ecological derangements of scale to disrupt conventional narrative viewpoint, though
some writers are beginning to adapt Modernist traditions of formal innovation to
these purposes. Clark fnds one possible direction in the course of a discussion of
nature writing which pleased me as a lover of that genre. He praises a passage by
Richard Jeferies, from the essay Swallow-Time in Field and Hedgerow, in which
Jeferies follows the jinking movement of a swallow fying low, almost constructing the
birds viewpoint as it makes its astonishing turns. For Clark, this is a moment in which
Victorian nature writing anticipated what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze saw as the
philosophical challenge of flm (197). But Clark wishes the passage had gone further:
Might it not be a matter of writing not he reached the end of the lane and
rose over the gate [] but somehow of a multiple happening of relations
in which defnitive concepts of lane and gate do not exist, but instead a
transitory and changing constellation of percepts, hunger and muscular fexing,
metamorphosing itself as a variously focussed assemblage of co-ordinations
and impulses? (198)
Te suggestion, so full of possibility, enables us to glimpse a new nature writing
capable of giving the ecological thought some experiential reality. It is typical of this
venturesome, stimulating and generous book.
Richard Kerridge
104
ENuNo1vs
1. See Towards A Deconstructive Environmental Criticism, Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 30,
Number 1, 2008, 45-68, and Some Climate Change Ironies: Deconstruction, Environmental
Politics and the Closure of Ecocriticism, Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 32, Number 1, 2010, 131-
149.
Te rise to prominence of animal studies over recent years as a distinct, interdisciplinary
enterprise poses a signifcant question for ecocritics. Given environmental criticisms
mission to explore the multifarious involvements of the human and the nonhuman, the
lives of animals appear very much a part of its natural territory. Yet, importantly, much
of the most interesting and infuential work on animals since the turn of the century
has been associated only indirectly with the continuing evolution of ecocriticism. Te
2012 second edition of Greg Garrards Ecocriticism contains a revised and expanded
chapter on animals, but, Garrard concedes, this extended treatment has barely kept
pace with research in this area, which is proceeding largely independently of the other
developments discussed in [this] book (2012: 203). Keeping pace with animal studies
becomes even more challenging in the light of its division into a number of sub-
disciplines, notably animality studies (probing the human as animal), zoocriticism
(examining the specifc literary meanings and functions of animals) and critical animal
studies (an orientation with an explicit commitment to animal liberation). At the risk
of ofering too broad a generalisation, the failure of ecocriticism and animal studies
to converge may be attributed to contrasting emphases on complexity and singularity.
While for ecocritics issues of interconnection and ecological fourishing can be
expected to appear to the fore, animal studies scholars are more likely to focus on the
individual organism. So, for example, the 2007 furore over the removal of hedgehogs
from Uist to protect ground-breeding birds would be likely to see ecocritics worrying
about the broader island ecology, while animal studies specialists keep their minds
on the plight of the hedgehogs. Te question, then, for both ecocriticism and animal
studies is, how to negotiate these diverging ethical priorities to take due account of
both ecosystemic and individual values?
Te sociologist Richard Twines Animals as Biotechnology: Ethics, Sustainability
and Critical Animal Studies ofers, among other things, some compelling grounds for
returning to this question and for thinking about animal and environmental ethics
Ricu.vu Twii, io1o, Aimzis zs Bio1rcuoiocv: E1uics,
Scs1zizniii1v zu Cvi1iczi Aimzi S1cuirs, Louo, E.v1usc.
JonN M:::vn
Green Letters Volume 16
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together. As the title suggests, Twines subject is the animal sciences, particularly the use
of new biotechnologies to enhance livestock for increased productivity. Undoubtedly,
Animals as Biotechnology is an impressive piece of research, the winner of the Institute
for Critical Animal Studies 2011 book of the year and a stinging critique of meat
production practices. Unsurprisingly, Twines most evident allegiance is to an animal
liberationist agenda, although the incorporation of an environmentalist perspective
is a key aspect of the books rationale. Indeed, the second sentence follows up on the
inclusion of sustainability in the subtitle, announcing that the global discourse of
climate change continues to place a question mark around the human production and
consumption of other animals (1).
Te books frst two parts investigate the cross species entanglements found within
developments in biotechnology (162). Twine engages here with the tendency of
bioethics to exclude animal ethics from debates concerning new molecular techniques
in livestock breeding and with the commercial infrastructure of these techniques,
geared towards fnding new ways of converting animals into innovative forms of
biocapital (59). Against this instrumentalist, anthropocentric culture Twine argues
for a new critical bioethics that is attentive to its own dualistic and humanist heritage
(20), and which enables a conception of human and animal fourishing as variously
interdependent (162). It is in the books third and fnal section Capturing Sustainability
in the Genome that Twine brings these arguments fully into contact with ecological
questions. Te account Twine gives of the biotechnological quest to incorporate
sustainability into the genetically modifed bodies of our postmodern livestock (as
in, for instance, the invention of an enviropig that excretes less of the pollutant
phosphorous) recalls some developments ongoing in postcolonial ecocriticism in
relation to the dubious credentials of some forms of green capitalism and suggests the
possibility of a fertile future engagement of critical animal and postcolonial studies.
Twines ultimate argument that sustainability cannot be captured in the genome
but must unfold in the refexive knowledge accrued around the corporeal and
ecological contexts of human-nonhuman interaction (174-75) hinges on the key
conviction that how we think about animals is unavoidably linked to how we think
about the world. Te books parting plea that we seize on our biotechnological moment
to contest particular discourses of the human as bad faith alibis for intransigence and
exploitation (175) is a demand of momentous proportions, but one that evokes a
central and urgent shared concern of ecocriticism and animal studies: what does it
mean to be human in an epoch of global crisis?
John Miller
MA CoUvsi Discvi v1i os
106
How does literature debate and refect humanitys relationship with Nature? What
makes the country, the wilderness or the city what it is? How does literature respond
to environmental destruction? Is it infuenced by modern environmental movements?
Te MA in Literature, Landscape and Environment enables students to address the
kind of questions that are increasingly important to the direction of modern English
literary studies.
Te MA is taught by Bath Spa staf who are internationally recognised for their
research: they have been chairs of the Association for the Study of Literature and
Environment; we have a prize-winning author on early modern London; and we
produce the journal Green Letters. In addition, we are at the centre of a region whose
writers such as Coleridge, Hardy, Austen, Jefries, Powys and Warner have been
intimately engaged with their environment.
Course details and information about studentships:
www.literaturelandenvironment.org.uk
Contact: s.gregg@bathspa.ac.uk; 01225 875482.
MA i Li1iv.1Uvi, L.usc.vi .u Evivomi1
Bn1n Svn UN:vvns:1v
107
Tis interdisciplinary program combines studies in the humanities and sciences. It
is global in its concerns but includes a core module focussing on the region of East
Anglia.
Field trips take you into the natural world. Students read environmental literature
and criticism from the early nineteenth century through to the present moment
and take at least one module in environmental science. Creative writing options are
available if that is your area of interest.
Assessment is though essays or creative writing, and a dissertation. One
year full-time or two years part-time. Teachers include: James Canton, Susan
Oliver, and distinguished environmental science writer and scholar Jules Pretty.
Open to applicants without specialist backgrounds in literary studies or the biological
sciences.
To apply online visit: www.essex.ac.uk/pgapply
For more information, please contact Jane Torp at thor@essex.ac.uk
Tel. 01206 872624, or Susan Oliver at soliver@essex.ac.uk.
MA Wiiu Wvi1ic: Li1iv.1Uvi .u 1ui Evivomi1
UN:vvns:1v ov Essvx
MA Course descriptions
108
Tis interdisciplinary programme is concerned with the complex relationships
Western societies have with their environments, exploring the ways in which these
relationships are being enacted and contested in an age of environmental crisis.
Te programme blends literary, flmic and journalistic depictions of the
environment with courses examining sustainability, environmental ethics and climate
change, as well as paying attention to green political discourse. Te programme
privileges the development of skills in communicating environmental ideas in a range
of genres, supported by tuition in communication strategies. Field trips are built in to
the curriculum.
Suitable for students with or without a specialism in literary or environmental
studies, the degree seeks to produce graduates who possess knowledge of environmental
attitudes from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Tis will assist their fnding
employment in felds such as arts and culture, media and journalism, advertising and
consultancy, or pursuing postgraduate work.
Course details can be found at:
www.gla.ac.uk/postgraduate/taught/environmentculturecommunication
MLi11 Evivomi1, CUi1Uvi .u CommUic.1io
UN:vvns:1v ov G:nsoow
Green Letters Volume 16
109
Consider a 2-yr Master of Science Communication or a 3-yr PhD degree at Te Centre
for Science Communication, University of Otago, New Zealand.
Words, images and sounds are how we communicate stories of the scientifc
world. Understanding and communicating science in its wider historical/cultural and
aesthetic context makes a good science storyteller. Stories are how we engage with an
audience.
A qualifcation from the Centre for Science Communication will give you the
tools and ideologies for communication through your medium, be it flm, writing,
podcasting, sci-art or anything else...
Course details can be found at: www.sciencecommunication.info
MSci Cvi.1ivi CommUic.1io
UN:vvns:1v ov O1noo, Nvw Zvn:nNu
MA Course descriptions
CoN1vN1s
Editorial
Sharae Deckard
Articles
World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature
Michael Niblett
Greening the Zombie: Caribbean Gothic, World-Ecology, and Socio-
Ecological Degradation
Kerstin Olo
Planted over the past: Ideology and Ecology in Israels National Eco-
Imaginary
Hannah Boast
Post-NAFTA Ecologies: Mechanical Tortoises and Flower-Picking
Cholos in Salvador Plascencias Te People of Paper
George English Brooks
Gardens and Gastropods: Space and Form in Shani Mootoos Cereus
Blooms at Night
Kyle Bladow
Book Reviews
MA Course Descriptions
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