Ecocultural Ethics: Critical Essays

The book offers twelve cases of ethics relating to ecology and culture. The twelve cases presented in the twelve essays, are written by eminent scholars from India, USA, Canada and Egypt. Employing various ecocritical frameworks, the writers have tried to understand/analyse literary, cinematic and other cultural texts and contexts. The volume argues that the principles of ethics are as dynamic as culture and nature. Any ecological perspectives/issues/conditions cannot be separated from their cultural contexts and thus need a culture-specific scrutiny to understand the ethics of ecoculture.

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.

Vidya Sarveswaran is Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India where she has been teaching since 2012. Before that she taught for thirteen years at Ethiraj College for Women in Chennai. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2008-09, and in 2016 she was a Rachel Carson Fellow at the University of Munich. As mentioned above, she coedited Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development, Ecocriticism of the Global South, and The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication with Scott Slovic and Swarnalatha Rangarajan. She is also a documentary filmmaker and has recently been completing a film that documents ecological narratives in Rajasthan.

Gyan Prakash is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University, USA. He is also the author of Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (1990), and Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999), and has co-authored a book on world history, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (2002).