Introduction: Postcolonial environments

The recent and welcome ecocritical turn in postcolonial studies brings a new set of resources and critical questions to a long-standing concern in our field: the environment. A growing body of purposeful postcolonial scholarship is transporting the wisdom of environmentalism to postcolonial debates about power, dispossession, neo-colonialism and creative critique, and is attending insistently to the problems of anthropocentrism, ecocide and/as genocide, disaster and recovery (always human-made, never “natural”) that obtain between the privations of globalization and the resistant possibilities of planetarity. This work complements long-standing research agendas and debates concerning the spatial politics and imagination of colonization as well as resistances to it, the managed movement of peoples from place to place, the particular postcolonialisms sourced in cities found in the metropolitan centres as well as the so-called colonial margins, the guerrilla landscapes of memory and struggle. The new intellectual as well as concrete and liquid environments of postcolonial scrutiny valuably empower us to think, again, of Frantz Fanon’s depiction of the colonized city, nervously zonal; of Edward W. Said’s insistence on a geographical imagination and the politics of land; of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s rendition of “worlding” as a troubling tactic of temporal and spatial requisitioning. Given the suspicion rightfully voiced towards progress and development these days in the light of the catastrophes of colonial interventions, contemporary occupations, small wars and their massed consequences, and environmental atrophy, we might embrace the ecocritical turn in postcolonial studies today as a vital revisioning, supplementing and sharpening of postcolonial thought, so that the necessary vigilance of critical and creative work is ever fit for purpose and protest.

The European summer months of 2015 brought ready evidence of the necessity to attend to postcolonial environments around the world. Floating precariously between neoliberal wars, the destruction of cities, villages and communities, and cultural and ecological desertification, millions of Syrians (and others too, of course) have pursued their right to safety and society while on the run, often by desperately respatializing the locations towards which they have been propelled. Train stations in Budapest have become shelters of exhausted dwelling, of unquiet slumber amidst the rush-hour rumble of the West on its way to work. The E45 motorway between Sweden and Germany has been recast as a life-line of migrant survival, where walking in the road happens to engender not endanger human life. Constrained within the mediascapes of a governmentality abdicating its duty to think of, and beyond, the other — caught by the kick of a Hungarian camerawoman — the latest dispossessed challenge many of us to confront the spatial prohibitions and permits which organize who may go where, to recognize that all environments are never the ready product of an always-already nature. The issues raised by the contributors to this edition of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature are urgent and unresolved, while the wisdom which the contributors bring to their particular points of focus resounds far beyond the particular contexts which preoccupy each here.

The essays which follow are grouped into three loose areas of confluence: animals, ecologies and localities. The attention to animals in postcolonial literature, critique and philosophy has been one of the most welcome aspects of the ecocritical turn. Matthew Whittle’s detailed encounter with the paintings of Walton Ford considers their critical engagement with the imperious frame of naturalistic art at the service of a colonial imaginary — epitomized by the work of John James Audubon — and exposes how Ford’s ironic rendering of big game hunting bears new relations beyond colonial subordination and speciesism. In replaying the great game of Empire in the flailing figure of the flamingo or the transposed prose of Hemingway beside an antelope’s resilient charge, Ford re-presents the hunter’s trophy in terms of colonial atrophy, breaking an allegory of epistemic violence as part of a reconstituted ecology of being. Jade Munslow Ong’s discussion of graphic narratives of the Rwandan genocide confronts the speciesism used both to justify and pursue the killing of human and non-human forms of life which characterized the slaughter at large. As she shows, the verminous vocabularies of Hutu hatred that declared the Tutsis as inyezi and inzoka were part of a wider murderous sovereignty which also visited violence on animals and changed the nation’s ecology as corpses mounted in the streets and became grim food for abandoned dogs. In attending to the creative endeavours of JP Stassen, Munslow Ong demonstrates how such specious, speciesist rhetoric and imagery are reformulated in the multi-modal space of graphic art in order to breed new forms of consciousness where humans, animals and the environment become part of an equitable art of reconciliation and recovery. Indeed, the revisioning of anthropocentric attitudes to the uses and inhabitants of the environment has increasingly become indivisible from the postcolonial critique of Empire’s worldings where dominion is struck over humans, animals, and terrain. Frances Hemsley identifies what she terms an ‘‘agriculturalization’ of genocide’ wrought by the recent Rwandan conflict and thinks through the work of mourning required by the de-naturalization of speciesist landscape orthodoxies in which the animal is no longer (our) other. In attending to the encounter between genocide and ecotourism discovered in Véronique Tadjo’s writing, Hemsley dexterously presents the symbolic and practical possibilities discovered in a “vernacular mourning ecology” that reaches beyond the constraints of humanitarian models and Western environmentalisms and admits the agency of the gaze of the animal to empower a new eco-critical ethics beyond the good and evil of human and non-human difference.

Such an ethics both brokers and demands new ecologies. Veronica Barnsley’s analysis of Benh Zeitlin’s award-winning film Beats of the Southern Wild (2012) focuses on the figure of the “postcolonial child”, rendered ever vulnerable amidst the devastations of catastrophe and capitalism, as provoking a radical new ecology of resequenced “time-worlds”. In offering a fledgling, fantastical model of human and human-animal relations through the protean childhood heroine Hushpuppy, Zeitlin’s film, Barnsley argues, deflects the developmentism and disenfranchisement beloved of capitalist modernity and hearteningly shapes a resistant post-humanism in tune with the continued agency of postcolonial and ecocritical thought. In offering a retort to those human rights discourses which instrumentalize the oppressed within the parameters of neoliberalism, both Barnsley’s essay and Beasts of the Southern Wild invite contemplation of how a post-anthropocentric ethical future might appear, as well as the manoeuvres required to bring the present ecological imperium apocalyptically to crisis. In their interviews with Minoli Salgado, John Howard, Avaes Mohammad and Francesca Moore, Anthony Carrigan and Shamira Meghani draw upon the long tradition of comparative and cross-cultural consciousness definitive of postcolonial studies in attending, in conceptually fresh and urgent ways, to the global production of catastrophe and its critical rendering across a range of cultural media. In empowering a sobering scepticism towards the mystifications of post-disaster “recovery” as well as the “norms” which recovery discourse claims as legitimate (that often cloak ecological cost and capitalist caprice), the creative response to the deprivations of disaster insist upon the demands of justice as part of their critical activism and their commitment to community, ecology and democratized recovery amidst the slow violence and heavy modernity of our post-progressive present.

In her work on hydropolitics and the River Jordan in the context of Palestinian literature, Hannah Boast replenishes the wider landscape of postcolonial studies by reminding us of the significance of both Palestine and the centrality of water to discussions of postcolonial environments. With water acknowledged as an essential source of organic survival and cultural symbolism, water wars entangle a complex of ecological decline, material dispossession and capitalist control. Boast’s reading of the riverscapes of Mahmoud Darwish’s and Mourid Barghouti’s writing exposes the hydropolitical Orientalism, environmental harm, and cultural and historical parching that are definitive of the occupation. In exposing and decrying the trauma of pastoral disruption unleashed by the desertification of landscape and community, these writers, in their different ways, refuse the aridity of an oppressed present through a range of rhetorical manoeuvres that promote rightful sovereignty. But, as Boast carefully demonstrates, these tactics risk a certain anthropocentrism that might make us pause for further thought, especially when they pull against the ethical possibilities and politics of seeking a ‘hydrocommons’.

Acting locally while thinking globally remains required business in our fledgling century; here, too, we might draw upon the wisdom of the past to resource the activities of the present that obtain across a range of localities. Sophia Brown’s engagement with the autobiographical writing of Rema Hammami penetratingly prompts us to remember that the conflict over space — in this instance the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of Palestine — is always at the same time a battle over the historical and discursive rendering of that space: a noumenal as well as concrete contestation. In probing the compact of chronicity and community within the walled confines of Israel/Palestine, where the transition from colonial to postcolonial has been timed out, Brown exposes the resistance to “spacio-cide” emerging from the strategic road-work of sumud where those checkpointed prohibitions upon Palestinian passage are confronted by a dissident spatialized creativity. Meanwhile, the view that landscape and nature are ever the product of cultural craft is given a distinctly postcolonial grounding in Lucienne Loh’s discussion of English rural mythographies at home and at large. In counting the cost of the English countryside’s contemporary quiddity after Empire, Loh engages with Julian Barnes’s satire of English decline into self-consumption and theme-park heritagism as an index of the former colonial centre’s postcolonial transformation, where village and vicarage become the spatial icons of the new global tourism. Meanwhile, in once-colonized India, as laid bare in Kiran Desai’s fiction, the imperious dividend of “countryside England” remains to be drawn by those Anglophiles keen to shore up positions of privilege, even while their offspring struggle to make ends meet in the migrant metropolis of the new US-led imperium. The imagined environments of England’s green and pleasant land die hard and remain available for recycling or recuperation.

It is the aim of this special issue to forge a modest critical environment of its own through the initiative and agency of its co-editors, whose commitment to furthering critical thinking in relation to “postcolonial environments” brought the contributors together for a symposium at the University of Manchester, UK, in January 2014. It is welcome to find the research assembled there being brought into wider critical circulation and conversation through the support of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Such research will add a great deal, as you will now see, to those ongoing discussions of postcolonial environments which we need ever more exigently.