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Climate Change, Ecological Catastrophe, and the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel

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Release : 2020-12-21
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 617/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Climate Change, Ecological Catastrophe, and the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel by : Justyna Poray-Wybranowska

Download or read book Climate Change, Ecological Catastrophe, and the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel written by Justyna Poray-Wybranowska. This book was released on 2020-12-21. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate Change, Ecological Catastrophe, and the Contemporary Novel responds to the critical need for transdisciplinary research on the relationship between colonialism and catastrophe. It represents the first sustained analysis of the connection between colonial legacy and present-day ecological catastrophe in postcolonial fiction. Analyzing contemporary South Asian and South Pacific novels that grapple with climate change and catastrophe, environmental exploitation and instability, and human-nonhuman relationships in degraded environments, it offers a much-needed corrective to dominant narratives about climate, crisis, and the everyday. Highlighting the contributions of literary fiction from the postcolonial South to the growing field of the environmental humanities, this book reconsiders the novel’s relationship with climate change and the contemporary environmental imaginary. Counter to dominant current theoretical discourses, it demonstrates that the novel form is ideally suited to literary and imaginative engagements with climate change and ecological catastrophe. The six case studies it examines connect contemporary ecological vulnerability to colonial legacies, reveal the critical role animals and the environment play in literary imaginations of post-catastrophe recovery, and together constellate a decolonial perspective on ecological catastrophe in the era of climate change. Drawing on the work of Indigenous authors and scholars who write about and against the Anthropocene, this book displaces conventional ways of thinking about the relationship between the mundane and the catastrophic and promotes greater dialogue between the largely siloed fields of postcolonial, Indigenous, and disaster studies.

Colonialism And/as Catastrophe

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Release : 2019
Genre :
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Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Colonialism And/as Catastrophe by : Justyna Ewa Poray-Wybranowska

Download or read book Colonialism And/as Catastrophe written by Justyna Ewa Poray-Wybranowska. This book was released on 2019. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation analyzes literary representations of ecological catastrophe in contemporary postcolonial fiction to study the relationship between colonialism and catastrophe and to reveal the critical role animals and the environment play in literary renditions of catastrophe. Its primary site of investigation are six novels that I use as case studies to examine how postcolonial texts render experiences of catastrophe and connect contemporary ecological vulnerability to colonial legacies. I focus on fictional texts that engage with ecological catastrophe and climate change, environmental instability and exploitation, and human-nonhuman relations in an era that some scholars refer to as the Anthropocene a time in which human activity has become a main driver of global environmental change. I limit my analysis to novels from South Asian and the South Pacific, because in addition to sharing a past as British colonies, these regions are consistently identified as at-risk for ecological catastrophes. I show that the formal properties of novels (their commitment to representing mundane and repeated events and their focus on detailed psychological portraits) make them productive sites for thinking through the way ecological vulnerability is experienced unequally across the globe. Highlighting that factors such as race, class, and indigeneity affect how individuals living in ecologically vulnerable regions experience catastrophe, I emphasize the way intersecting positionalities shape the narrative representation of catastrophe. I demonstrate that relationships with local animal species and the land help environmentally vulnerable populations cope with catastrophe, and that postcolonial texts use the nonhuman to work through violent environmental events. In this way, I foreground the potential contributions of literary fiction to transnational efforts to better understand how postcolonial subjects experience ecological catastrophe and massive-scale environmental change, and how they imagine possible recovery.

Seasons of Misery

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Release : 2013-10-09
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 141/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Seasons of Misery by : Kathleen Donegan

Download or read book Seasons of Misery written by Kathleen Donegan. This book was released on 2013-10-09. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis—both experiential and existential—at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed. Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid the upheavals of the New World. This constant state of crisis also produced the first distinctively colonial literature as settlers attempted to process events that they could neither fully absorb nor understand. Bringing a critical eye to settlers' first-person accounts, Donegan applies a unique combination of narrative history and literary analysis to trace how settlers used a language of catastrophe to describe unprecedented circumstances, witness unrecognizable selves, and report unaccountable events. Seasons of Misery addresses both the stories that colonists told about themselves and the stories that we have constructed in hindsight about them. In doing so, it offers a new account of the meaning of settlement history and the creation of colonial identity.

Postcolonial Disaster

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Release : 2020-04-15
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 728/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Postcolonial Disaster by : Pallavi Rastogi

Download or read book Postcolonial Disaster written by Pallavi Rastogi. This book was released on 2020-04-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postcolonial Disaster studies literary fiction about crises of epic proportions in contemporary South Asia and Southern Africa: the oceanic disaster in Sri Lanka, the economic disaster in Zimbabwe, the medical disaster in South Africa and Botswana, and the geopolitical disaster in India and Pakistan. Pallavi Rastogi argues that postcolonial fiction about catastrophe is underpinned by a Disaster Unconscious, a buried but mobile agenda that forces disastrous events to narrate themselves. She writes that in disaster fiction, a literary Story and its real-life Event are in constant dialectic tension. In recent disasters, Story and Event are tied together as the urgency to circulate information and rebuild in the aftermath of the disaster dictates the flow of the narrative. As the Story acquires temporal distance from the Event, such as the seventy-three years since the partition of India in 1947, it plays more with form and theme, to expand beyond a tale about an all-consuming tragedy. Story and Event are in a constant dance with each other, and the Disaster Unconscious plays the tune to which they move. Rastogi creates a narratology for postcolonial disaster fiction and brings concepts from Disaster Studies into the realm of literary analysis.

Seasons of Misery

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Release : 2014
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 407/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Seasons of Misery by : Kathleen Donegan

Download or read book Seasons of Misery written by Kathleen Donegan. This book was released on 2014. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seasons of Misery offers a boldly original account of early English settlement in American by placing catastrophe and crisis at the center of the story. Donegan argues that the constant state of suffering and uncertainty decisively formed the colonial identity and produced the first distinctly colonial literature.

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