Towards a Global Eco-Consciousness in Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats

作者：Amber Wallis · 发表于：ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment · 年份：2013 · DOI：10.1093/isle/ist088 · 被引用次数：9 · 研究领域：Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature、Geographies of human-animal interactions

The last five or so years have seen serious critical momentum in bridging some of the gaps between ecocriticism and postcolonialism. Rob Nixon has provided us with perhaps the most succinct and useful contrast between the environmentalist and postcolonialist schools of thought: on the one hand, postcolonialists tend to focus on hybridity, displacement, cosmopolitanism, and uncovering history, while, on the other hand, eco/environmental critics foreground purity, place, nationalism, and transcending human history/time. It is widely noted that some of the gaps in the often heated repartee between postcolonial and ecocritical/environmentalsim stem from the history of the environmental movement, which has some of its roots firmly planted in the logic of natural and cultural domination. As Elizabeth Deloughrey and George Handley observe, “[N]atural history, conservation policy, and the language of nature—the very systems of logic that we draw from today to speak of conservation and sustainability—are derived from a long history of the colonial exploitation of nature, as well as the assimilation of natural epistemologies from all over the globe” (12). Also, the eco/environmental field has not been shy about condemning feminist and post-colonial theorists for being too “anthropomorphic.” I am thinking of course of some elements of the “deep ecology” movement that have been at times woefully oblivious to human suffering. Yet even this “compromised anti-anthropocentrism” (Mukherjee 26...