Postcolonial-Ecocriticism and the Idea of Place

 

When Frantz Fanon asserted that "for a colonized people, the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity," he might have laid the groundwork for the critical field of postcolonial-ecocriticism. According to Fanon, the term "land" is the defining feature of former colonies, serving as both an identity marker and a source of livelihood for the inhabitants, including both the colonizers and the colonized, both before and after the end of physical colonialism. This insight provides a basis for the collaboration of ideological concerns of postcolonial critics to develop a more comprehensive theory on colonized people and their natural environment.

 

While ecocriticism initially focused on the conservation of nature, particularly "the wilderness," postcolonialism centers on the "analytics of place, power, knowledge, and representation". Therefore, postcolonialism and ecocriticism converge on the idea that both fields are concerned with the representation of place, with postcolonialism emphasizing the historical aspects of place and ecocriticism focusing on the aesthetics of place.

 

Erin James suggests that when the environmental focus of ecocriticism intersects with the cultural, linguistic, and representational concerns of postcolonialism, there is an opportunity to "expand the boundaries of each discourse in new and exciting ways". However, this combination creates a philosophical instability within postcolonial-ecocriticism. Rob Nixon identifies key differences between the two:

 

Postcolonialists emphasize hybridity and cross-culturation, while ecocritics historically lean towards discourses of purity, emphasizing virgin wilderness and preserving 'uncorrupted' places.

Postcolonialism often deals with displacement, while environmental literary studies prioritize the literature of specific places.

Postcolonial studies tend to favor cosmopolitan and transnational perspectives, criticizing nationalism. In contrast, environmental literature and criticism often develop within a nationalistic American framework.

Postcolonialism explores marginalized histories, often along transnational axes of migrant memory, while environmental literature tends to repress history for a pursuit of timeless moments with nature.