Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development

A new critical formation, sometimes called environmental humanities, has been successfully interrogating the assumptions about nature, history, and culture made by an earlier generation of largely European and North American writers, scholars, and activists. This collection of thoughtful and stimulating essays, arranged and introduced superbly by the editors, continues with this essential task of building a properly worldly analysis and interpretation of our current environmental crises—a task on which, quite literally, our lives might depend. -- Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Warwick University
This intriguing collection is like an odyssey into the hermeneutics of “ecoambiguity.” It sheds light on the problematic entanglements of ecodegradation and social repression with vivid local examples from the Global South. The essays here explore how ecoambiguity emerges from the contested intersectional sites of environmental and social justice. They reveal the contingencies of nature-culture interactions when pressing environmental problems are materially bound up with social distress and cultural oppression. Zeroing in on a particular local narrative, each essay unravels the spectral lines that disclose ecoambiguity as a historical and political process of inadvertent collisions between people and the environment. The co-extensivity of ecological devastation with poverty, pollution, domestic colonialism, and industrial development is so well expressed that the ambivalences of eco-deterioration immediately make sense. -- Serpil Oppermann, Professor of English, Hacettepe University, and President of EASLCE
This is a dynamic, wide-ranging collection. It offers powerful testimony to the entanglement between cultural and environmental challenges. It also reminds us of the power of literature and film as imaginative resources for deepening our understanding of those challenges. The book’s geographical reach is unusual and impressive. -- Rob Nixon, Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professor in the Humanities and the Environment, Princeton University
This innovative collection decisively outlines why environmental justice and postcolonial theories are taking hold among the ecocritics at work in China, Japan, India, Ukraine, Mexico, and Brazil, and other indigenous or first nations—such as the Mohawk. Distinguished established scholars, and important new voices in the field, many from the cultures about which they write, confront the paradoxical tendencies of selective cultural appreciation and destruction found in some of the globe’s most talked-about ‘developing’ nations. The result is a powerful and highly engaging new contribution to the field that will challenge conventional assumptions about the environmentalism(s), literatures, and films of the nations, regions, and communities under analysis. -- Joni Adamson, co-editor, American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons
An excellent and timely collection, consolidating recent advances in postcolonial ecocriticism but pushing it in new directions and applying its theories and methods to under-represented parts of an increasingly connected but unevenly developed and culturally differentiated world. The early chapters on China, Tibet, and Japan are especially useful insofar as these complex regions rarely feature in more conventional accounts of postcolonial ecocriticism; but all the essays here make significant contributions to a densely political field which, in lead author Karen Thornber’s words, ‘further ambiguates [rather than resolves] the ecological conundrums it describes.’ -- Graham Huggan, Chair of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures, School of English, University of Leeds