Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism (Ecocritical Theory and Practice)

Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development takes stock of cultural and environmental contexts in many different regions of the world by exploring literature and film. Artists and scholars working in the social ecology, environmental justice, and postcolonial arenas have long recognized that as soon as we tug on a thread of “ecodegradation,” we generally find it linked to some form of cultural oppression. The reverse is also often true. In the spirit of postcolonial ecocriticism, the studies collected by Scott Slovic, R. Swarnalatha, and Vidya Sarveswaran emphasize the impossibility of disentangling environmental and cultural problems. While not all the authors explicitly invoke Karen Thornber’s term “ecoambiguity” or the concepts and terminology of postcolonial ecocriticism, their articles frequently bring to light various ironies. For example, the fact that Ukrainian environmental experience in the twenty-first century is defined by one of the world’s most infamous industrial disasters, the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, yet Ukrainian culture, like many throughout the world, actually cherishes a profound, even animistic, attachment to the wonders of nature. The repetition of this and other paradoxes in human cultural responses to the more-than-human world reinforces our sense of the congruities and idiosyncrasies of human culture. Every human culture, regardless of its condition of economic and industrial development, has produced its own version of “environmental literature and art”—but the nuances of this work reflect that culture’s precise social and geophysical circumstances. In various ways, these stories of community and development from across the planet converge and diverge, as told and explained by distinguished scholars, many of whom come from the cultures represented in these articles.

Jyotirmaya Tripathy is Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India.

Laura A. White is Associate Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, USA.

George B. Handley is Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brigham Young University, USA. His previous publications include New World Poetics: Nature and the Academic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott (2007) and, as co-editor, Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (2011).

Scott Slovic is University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Idaho, USA, where has been teaching since 2012-previously he was a professor at Texas State University and the University of Nevada, Reno. He served as founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) from 1992 to 1995, and since 1995 he has edited ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment for ASLE and Oxford University Press. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of twenty-seven books, including, most recently, The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (with Swarnalatha Rangarajan and Vidya Sarveswaran). His forthcoming books include Nature in Literary Studies (coedited with Peter Remien) for Cambridge University Press's Critical Concepts Series. He coedits Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment with Swarnalatha Rangarajan and Routledge Environmental Humanities with Joni Adamson and Yuki Masami.

Swarnalatha Rangarajan is Professor of English at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India where she has been teaching since 2010. Previously, she was a Fulbright Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University and a Charles Wallace Fellow at Cambridge University. She has coedited such books as Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism (2014) and Ecocriticism of the Global South (2015) (with Scott Slovic and Vidya Sarveswaran) and is the author of the novel Final Instructions (2015). She served as the founding editor of The Indian Journal of Ecocriticism and has guest-edited two special issues on Indian ecosophy for The Trumpeter. Her monograph Ecocriticism: Big Ideas and Practical Solutions appeared in 2018.