Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee,

Postcolonial Environments (2010)

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence (2011)

Patricia Yaeger (ed.), “Literature in the Ages of Wood,

Tallow, Coal...” (2011)
Wai-chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, Shades of the
Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007)
Ursula Heise, Sense of Place, Sense of Planet:
Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008)
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffen, Postcolonial
Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (2009)
Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt, Postcolonial Green:
Environmental Politics and World Literature (2010).
Anthony Carrigan, Postcolonial Tourism: Literature,
Culture, and Environment (2010)
Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley,
Postcolonial Ecologies (2011)
Postcolonial Studies and Ecocriticism
 Both emerge as distinct fields of academic
specialization in the 1970s; institutionally consolidated
by the 1990s

 Postcolonial studies as a response to end of post-war

boom, long downturn, and new imperialist offensives
in the 1970s

 Ecocriticism as a response to shift in environmental

consciousness signalled by, eg., Earth Day, 1970;
Stockholm, 1972; Club of Rome report, 1972; ‘Blue
Marble’ earth shot, 1972; The Good Life, 1975/
Survivors, 1975.
‘Deep Ecology’ vs. ‘Social Ecology’
Deep Ecology (eg. Arne Naess):
 sought to change the reflexive anthropomorphic position
held by human beings to the environment
 to stress the relationality all living and non-living forms
 protest the impact of industrial capitalism on nature
BUT
 Stuck in Cartesian binary – human and natural world
 Idealist; lack of attention to material structures that
produce specific socio-ecological configurations
 First-worldist / typical solution is US-centric – vision of the
pioneer farmer working the land
Social Ecology (eg. Raymond Williams; Ramachandra
Guha)
 Nature and society as a dialectical unity
 Emphasis on the particular forms of economic and
social domination enabled by / embedded in specific
configurations of socio-ecological relations
 Attention to colonial and imperial histories
 Guha, “Environmentalism of the Poor” – struggles over
social justice as simultaneously struggles over
environmental justice
They dazzle me with the tonnage of cotton or coca that
has been exported, the acreage that has been planted
with olive trees or grapevines.
I am talking about natural economies that have
been disrupted – harmonious and viable economies
adapted to the indigenous population – about food
crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently
introduced, agricultural development oriented solely
toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries,
about the looting of products, the looting of raw
materials.
Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism
“Yet it seems largely true that the conceptual
importance of the environment to anti-colonial
struggles in Africa, Asia and the Latin American
countries appears to be ignored in the foundational
writings of the triumvirate of Edward Said, Homi
Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak that formed the academic
field of postcolonial studies in the mid-1970s and
1980s.”
Postcolonial Environments, 48
“Once we have grasped this idea of postcolonial India
as a globalized entity within a world-system, it is
impossible not to see that its condition speaks
simultaneously at local and global, specific and
general, levels. What is happening in India is also
happening, has happened and will happen in the rest
of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Since at the heart of
both colonialism and neo-colonialism lies the
historical fact of unfolding, expanding capital, India
(and all the other ‘new’ postcolonies) can be seen as a
part of a singular, but radically uneven, world.”
Postcolonial Environments, 7
 “Instead of divvying up literary works into hundred-
year intervals (or elastic variants like the long
eighteenth or twentieth century) or categories
harnessing the history of ideas (Romanticism,
Enlightenment), what happens if we sort texts
according to the energy sources that made them
possible?”
Yaeger, “Editor’s Column”, 305

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgRYncR1Nog
“Roadunner”, The Modern Lovers
(1970)
Roadrunner, roadrunner
Going faster miles an hour
Gonna drive past the Stop 'n' Shop
With the radio on
I'm in love with Massachusetts
And the neon when it's cold outside
And the highway when it's late at
night
Got the radio on
I'm like the roadrunner
Alright
I'm in love with modern moonlight
128 when it's dark outside
I'm in love with Massachusetts
I'm in love with the radio on
It helps me from being alone late at
night
It helps me from being lonely late at
night
I don't feel so bad now in the car
Don't feel so alone, got the radio on
Like the roadrunner
That's right
Said welcome to the spirit of 1956
Patient in the bushes next to '57
The highway is your girlfriend as you
go by quick
Suburban trees, suburban speed
And it smells like heaven
And I say roadrunner once
Roadrunner twice
I'm in love with rock & roll and I'll be
out all night
Roadrunner
That's right
Well now
Roadrunner, roadrunner
Going faster miles an hour
Gonna drive to the Stop 'n' Shop
With the radio on at night
And me in love with modern
moonlight
Me in love with modern rock & roll
Modern girls and modern rock & roll
Don't feel so alone, got the radio on
Like the roadrunner
The dominant energy sources through which the
world-system as re-made itself; the “great energy
transitions of the modern world”:

Peat and charcoal – 1450s-1830s

Coal – 1750s-1950s
Oil and natural gas – 1870s-present.

Moore, “Transcending the Metabolic Rift”, 22.

 Castle of Dracula, Texas Chainsaw
Otranto, 1764 1897 Massacre, 1974

Moore, “Sometime after Podobnik, “coal panics”;

1760, the ‘first’ agricultural Oil shocks, 1973,
“end of the expansionary 1979; long
revolution was showing clear cycle of the global
signs of exhaustion. Within downturn
coal system”
England, per-acre yield
growth stagnated after mid-
century, and most of
European agriculture
experienced the same
effect.”

Peat/Charcoal Coal (1750s-1950s) Oil and natural gas (1870s-present)

(1450s-1830s)
1760-1810 1820-1860 1870-1910 1950-1960 1970-
Gothic Form Present