Towards an ecocritical postcolonialism: Val Plumwood's Environmental Culture in dialogue with Patrick Chamoiseau

摘要

This essay participates in the work of synthesizing postcolonialism and ecocriticism by pointing to the texts and approaches that suggest a productive resolution of the tension between these two critical practices. At the heart of my discussion is Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002), by the Australian ecophilosopher Val Plumwood, which is a work that offers a corrective to critical postcolonialism's “over-culturalised sensibility”. Read in conjunction with a number of works by Martinican novelist and essayist Patrick Chamoiseau, Plumwood's ecophilosophical insights into the distribution of capitalism's negative externalities, the persistence of the centre/periphery model of politics, and the consequences of remoteness allow for readings that account not just for the human effects of the post/colonial condition but also for the effects on the non-human world.