Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development takes stock of cultural and environmental contexts in many different regions of the world by exploring literature and film. Artists and scholars working in the social ecology, environmental justice, and postcolonial arenas have long recognized that as soon as we tug on a thread of "ecodegradation," we generally find it linked to some form of cultural oppression. The reverse is also often true. In the spirit of postcolonial ecocriticism, the studies collected by Scott Slovic, R. Swarnalatha, and Vidya Sarveswaran emphasize the impossibility of disentangling environmental and cultural problems. While not all the authors explicitly invoke Karen Thornber's term "ecoambiguity" or the concepts and terminology of postcolonial ecocriticism, their articles frequently bring to light various ironies. For example, the fact that Ukrainian environmental experience in the twenty-first century is defined by one of the world's most infamous industrial disasters, the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, yet Ukrainian culture, like many throughout the world, actually cherishes a profound, even animistic, attachment to the wonders of nature. The repetition of this and other paradoxes in human cultural responses to the more-than-human world reinforces our sense of the congruities and idiosyncrasies of human culture. Every human culture, regardless of its condition of economic and industrial development, has produced its own version of "environmental literature and art"-but the nuances of this work reflect that culture's precise social and geophysical circumstances. In various ways, these stories of community and development from across the planet converge and diverge, as told and explained by distinguished scholars, many of whom come from the cultures represented in these articles.
Table of Contents Introduction Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran Chapter 1: Plundering Borderlands North and South Karen Thornber Chapter 2: Tibet, a Topos in Ecopolitics of the Global South Gang Yue Chapter 3: Red China, Green Amnesia: Locating Environmental Justice in Contemporary Chinese Literature Cheng Li and Yanjun Liu Chapter 4: Minamata and the Symbolic Discourse of the South Tsutomu Takahashi Chapter 5: Indian Environmentalism and Its Fragments Jyotirmaya Tripathy Chapter 6: From Bhopal to Biometrics: Biological Citizenship in the Age of Globalization Pamod Nayar Chapter 7: Beyond the Eco-flaneur's Footsteps: Perambulatory Narration in Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying Laura A. White Chapter 8: Reconsidering the Eco-Imperatives of Ukrainian Consciousness: An Introduction to Ukrainian Environmental Literature Inna Sukhenko Chapter 9: Kissed by Lightning and Fourth Cinema's Natureculture Continuum Salma Monani Chapter 10: Under all the laws, natural, human, and divine: Reinterpreting La Leyenda Negra's Colonial Purpose Dora Ramirez-Dhoore Chapter 11: Mapmaking, Rubbertapping: Cartography and Social Ecology in Euclides da Cunha's The Amazon: Land Without History Aarti Madan Chapter 12: Down Under: New World Literatures and Ecocriticism George B. Handley Index Contributors
