Wilderness Into Civilized Shapes

Download or read book "Wilderness Into Civilized Shapes" written by Laura Wright and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines how postcolonial landscapes and environmental issues are represented in fiction. Wright creates a provocative discourse in which the fields of postcolonial theory and ecocriticism are brought together. Laura Wright explores the changes brought by colonialism and globalization as depicted in an array of international works of fiction in four thematically arranged chapters. She looks first at two traditional oral histories retold in modern novels, Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness (South Africa) and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood (Kenya), that deal with the potentially devastating effects of development, particularly through deforestation and the replacement of native flora with European varieties. Wright then uses J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (South Africa), Yann Martel's Life of Pi (India and Canada), and Joy Williams's The Quick and the Dead (United States) to explore the use of animals as metaphors for subjugated groups of individuals. The third chapter deals with India's water crisis via Arundhati Roy's activism and her novel, The God of Small Things. Finally, Wright looks at three novels--Flora Nwapa's Efuru (Nigeria), Keri Hulme's The Bone People (New Zealand), and Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother (South Africa)--that depict women's relationships to the land from which they have been dispossessed. Throughout Wilderness into Civilized Shapes, Wright rearticulates questions about the role of the writer of fiction as environmental activist and spokesperson, the connections between animal ethics and environmental responsibility, and the potential perpetuation of a neocolonial framework founded on western commodification and resource-based imperialism.

Download or read book Animal Fiction in Late Twentieth-Century Canada written by Alice Higgs and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-12-11 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animal Fiction in Late Twentieth-Century Canada fulfils a vital contribution to the conversation surrounding animal representation as a point of continuity in national narratives and supports the idea that focusing on narratives of responsibility and care influences better relations with both non-human animals and across settler-Indigenous boundaries. Alice Higgs engages with on-going debates regarding reconciliation by demonstrating that it is imperative to critique settler colonial environmental frameworks and place autonomy back into Indigenous communities by bringing Indigenous practices of custodianship and relationality to bear more generally. This book also develops a number of conversations in animal studies in relation to the politics of representation. Higgs studies a range of canonical Canadian authors, demonstrating a progress across the period in which it is possible to identify the emergence of a literary pro-animal turn.

Download or read book Postcolonial Ecocriticism written by Graham Huggan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-17 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second edition of Postcolonial Ecocriticism, a book foundational for its field, has been updated to consider recent developments in the area such as environmental humanities and animal studies. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examine transverse relations between humans, animals and the environment across a wide range of postcolonial literary texts and also address key issues such as global warming, food security, human over-population in the context of animal extinction, queer ecology, and the connections between postcolonial and disability theory. Considering the postcolonial first from an environmental and then a zoocritical perspective, the book looks at: Narratives of development in postcolonial writing Entitlement, belonging and the pastoral Colonial 'asset stripping' and the Christian mission The politics of eating and the representation of cannibalism Animality and spirituality Sentimentality and anthropomorphism The changing place of humans and animals in a 'posthuman' world. With a new preface written specifically for this edition and an annotated list of suggestions for further reading, Postcolonial Ecocriticism offers a comprehensive and fully up-to-date introduction to a rapidly expanding field.

Download or read book Animals and Desire in South African Fiction written by Jason D. Price and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-07-15 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the political potential of affective experiences of desire as reflected in contemporary South African literature. Jason Price argues that definitions of desire deployed by capitalist and colonial culture maintain social inequality by managing relations to ensure a steady flow of capital and pleasure for the dominant classes, whereas affective encounters with animals reveal the nonhuman nature of desire, a biopower that, in its unpredictability, can frustrate regimes of management and control. Price wonders how animals’ different desires might enable new modes of thought to positively transform and resist the status quo. This book contends that South African literary works employ nonhuman desire and certain indigenous notions of desire to imagine a South Africa that can be markedly different from the past.

Download or read book Critical Ecofeminism written by Greta Gaard and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-06-16 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Australian feminist philosopher Val Plumwood coined the term “critical ecofeminism” to “situate humans in ecological terms and non-humans in ethical terms,” for “the two tasks are interconnected, and cannot be addressed properly in isolation from each other.” Variously using the terms “critical ecological feminism,” “critical anti-dualist ecological feminism,” and “critical ecofeminism,” Plumwood’s work developed amid a range of perspectives describing feminist intersections with ecopolitical issues—i.e., toxic production and toxic wastes, indigenous sovereignty, global economic justice, species justice, colonialism and dominant masculinity. Well over a decade before the emergence of posthumanist theory and the new materialisms, Plumwood’s critical ecofeminist framework articulates an implicit posthumanism and respect for the animacy of all earthothers, exposing the linkages among diverse forms of oppression, and providing a theoretical basis for further activist coalitions and interdisciplinary scholarship. Had Plumwood lived another ten years, she might have described her work as “Anthropocene Ecofeminism,” “Critical Material Ecofeminism,” “Posthumanist Anticolonial Ecofeminism”—all of these inflections are present in her work. Here, Critical Ecofeminism advances upon Plumwood’s intellectual, activist, and scholarly work by exploring its implications for a range of contemporary perspectives and issues--critical animal studies, plant studies, sustainability studies, environmental justice, climate change and climate justice, masculinities and sexualities. With the insights available through a critical ecofeminism, these diverse eco-justice perspectives become more robust.

Download or read book The Postcolonial World written by Jyotsna G. Singh and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Postcolonial World presents an overview of the field and extends critical debate in exciting new directions. It provides an important and timely reappraisal of postcolonialism as an aesthetic, political, and historical movement, and of postcolonial studies as a multidisciplinary, transcultural field. Essays map the terrain of the postcolonial as a global phenomenon at the intersection of several disciplinary inquiries. Framed by an introductory chapter and a concluding essay, the eight sections examine: Affective, Postcolonial Histories Postcolonial Desires Religious Imaginings Postcolonial Geographies and Spatial Practices Human Rights and Postcolonial Conflicts Postcolonial Cultures and Digital Humanities Ecocritical Inquiries in Postcolonial Studies Postcolonialism versus Neoliberalism The Postcolonial World looks afresh at re-emerging conditions of postcoloniality in the twenty-first century and draws on a wide range of representational strategies, cultural practices, material forms, and affective affiliations. The volume is an essential reading for scholars and students of postcolonialism.

Download or read book (In)digestion in Literature and Film written by Serena J. Rivera and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (In)digestion in Literature and Film: A Transcultural Approach is a collection of essays spanning diverse geographic areas such as Brazil, Eastern Europe, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States. Despite this geographic variance, they all question disordered eating practices represented in literary and filmic works. The collection ultimately redefines disorder, removing the pathology and stigma assigned to acts of non-normative eating. In so doing, the essays deem taboo practices of food consumption, rejection and avoidance as expressions of resistance and defiance in the face of restrictive sociocultural, political, and economic normativities. As a result, disorder no longer equates to "out of order", implying a sense of brokenness, but is instead envisioned as an act against the dominant of order of operations. The collection therefore shifts critical focus from the eater as the embodiment of disorder to the problematic norms that defines behaviors as such.