Wednesday 18 November 2020

Thinking Activity:Sunday Reading: Ecocriticism



Hello readers !

 Here on my blog. The Video Recording of the Live Session: Devang Nanavati give the some thought pn Ecocriticism.



☆ Ecocriticism:





"Ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment." 

 

Postcolonial ecocriticism stems from the realization that Western-centrism and anthropocentrism consolidate one another. It draws attention to the principles of social ecology and the question of environmental justice, expressing concern about the fact that subaltern humans are denied access to the resources of the land they inhabit and emphasizing the sustainability of their cultural practices. Colonization has involved the anthropocentric view of the land as property and the treatment of the colonized environment as empty space. Places have been erased and turned into space, which makes these two concepts a valuable intersection point between the two approaches. The hard-won joint consideration of environmental and post-colonial social issues pertaining to neoimperialism is advantageous to both perspectives, which can complement each other in the struggle to resist political systems of domination, which are supported by dualistic hierarchical logic. The ideological opposition between humans and non-humans has served as the basis for treating the subaltern as less than human and justifying Western man's subjugation of the non-human world.


Global powers continue to vie for spaces and resources in the developing world to fuel a neo-mercantilist world economic system, with public diplomacy taking the place of the civilizing mission and development assistance taking the place of direct rule.postcolonial ecocritical turn in international relations, one that can shift the ways in which policymakers can process international crises, develop policies and train future practitioners.Ecocriticism is a relatively new subfield of literary criticism. The early major works of ecocriticism in the 1990s focused almost exclusively on British romanticism and American nature writing, with a particular attention to the work Henry David Thoreau, and “became especially identified with the project of reorienting literary-critical thinking toward more serious engagement with nonhuman nature.”


for example, have claimed that traditional ecocriticism’s focus on only the most superficial aspects of the environment only serves to concretize the “split between nature and culture that founds a structurating antinomy even in the face of constitutive and intractable hybridities.”


 Another  example like ,superimposing Thoreauvian ecocriticism onto postcolonial landscapes is just “another attempt to ‘white out’ Black Africa by coloring it green.”


Postcolonial ecocriticism can play a role as a descriptive tool in international affairs by highlighting the continuity between human and natural security, particularly in instances of lingering political and economic inequality due to the effects of colonialism, as well as postcolonial, elite-driven processes such as capitalism or the nationalization and denationalization of land and natural resources. The key ideal of postcolonial ecocriticism  that places and spaces have meaning beyond their role as a stage upon which action plays out  is useful in understanding both “hard” military histories and “soft” socio-cultural histories.




"The world has become a more turbulent place, where anyone with a new idea can put it into action before you can say “startup” and launch widespread movements with a single Tweet. This has left organizational leaders with a real problem, since the trusted, traditional approach to strategic planning is based on assumptions that no longer hold. The static strategic plan is dead.



☆ Ecology in literature:

Ecocriticism was a term coined in the late 1970s by combining "criticism" with a shortened form of "ecology"− the science that investigates the interrelations of all forms of plant and animal life with each other and with their physical habitats. " Ecocritism" (or by alternative names, environmental criticism and green studies) designates the critical writings which explore the relations between literature and the biological and physical environment, conducted with an acute awareness of the damage being wrought on that environment by human activities.



☆ Ania Loomba's Conclusion  Chapter:



This concluding chapter offers an inevitably partial examination of challenges, indicating some new directions postcolonial studies has either taken, or must take. It highlights four areas: the environment; the history and present of indigenous peoples and societies; premodern histories and cultures; and the ongoing colonisation of territories, labour and peoples by global capitalism. All of these demand fresh thinking about colonial history, the shape of freedom, racial hierarchies, gender dynamics, and community. It suggests that such thinking is taking place, in the academy and beyond. Many commentators have suggested that postcolonial studies should not be thought of as a discrete field so much as an approach that has been honed by work on colonial dynamics and legacies in several disciplines; nevertheless, it is also a formation within the academy, shaped largely within English departments. The chapter also discusses some recent scholarship and political movements that show why that the colonial past and the globalized present are deeply interconnected.




Thank you...

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