Richard Watts  (Tulane University)
Postcolonialism and the Challenges of Ecocriticism

In a recently published anthology titled Caribbean Literature and the Environment, the editors rightly state in their introduction that, "(a)lthough ecocriticism overlaps with postcolonialism in assuming that deep explorations of place are vital strategies to recover autonomy, postcolonial criticism has given little attention to environmental factors" (5). My paper pursues this critique by briefly considering the kinds of pressure that ecocriticism – like the other emerging theoretical paradigms cited in the call for papers – exerts on postcolonialism. More significantly, though, it seeks the texts and approaches that point to a productive resolution of the tension between these two critical practices. At the heart of my discussion will be the Australian ecophilosopher Val Plumwood's Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. Plumwood's central contention is that Reason, or what she refers to as the rationalist's cult of Reason, is largely responsible for the current ecological crisis. She notes, however, that "(p)ostmodernists write of a 'crisis of reason', but their over-culturalised sensibilities have trivialised the rational crisis and identified it with a critical crisis" (15). I argue that much of contemporary postcolonial criticism, in spite of its reliance on botanical metaphors (rhizome, diaspora, hybridity), is similarly "over-culturalized" or anthropocentric. The resulting omission of the environment from postcolonial criticism paradoxically contributes to reinforcing the dominant logic of industrialized capitalism where, as Plumwood puts it, "a cultural 'mind' (…) cannot acknowledge and adapt itself properly to its material 'body', the embodied and ecological support base it draws on in the long-denied counter-sphere of 'nature'" (15). Although Plumwood has little to say about contemporary postcolonial studies (her few references to the field are mostly to Orientalism-era Edward Saïd and the center-periphery model of postcolonial analysis), her book makes a compelling case for a movement toward an ecologically embedded cultural criticism that a less generalized form of postcolonial studies might be able to enact. Humans and nature were both differentially affected by the particular form that colonialism (whether French, British, Spanish, or Dutch) took in a particular place, and those effects continue to be felt to this day. Francophone postcolonial studies begins this localizing or particularizing movement, and some of the recent critical work of Edouard Glissant (cf., "Martinique pays bio") suggests that it might also be capable of integrating an environmental perspective. I therefore conclude that it is in the direction of increasingly specific postcolonial studies, and not in the even more grandly universalizing theories of globalization, that the postcolonial critical paradigm should evolve.