Litnet

Both Postcolonialism and ecocriticism are terms fraught with tensions. While they haven't followed identical trajectories through time and criticism, both critical strategies nevertheless occupy similar modes and subjects of attention in contemporary literary theory. Yet, as Helen Tiffin and Graham Huggan suggest in Postcolonial Ecocriticism, approaching the two fields as correctives for one another perpetuates the assumptions that postcolonialism appeals only to anthropocentric values, while ecocriticism attends solely to eco-/bio-centric views. Postcolonial-ecocritical approaches have the capacity to work in complementary ways, illustrating the constitutive relations between social and environmental concerns.

We want to situate this special issue of ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature in the wake of recent critical efforts to engage the dynamic field of postcolonial ecocriticism such as Postcolonial Green, Postcolonial Ecologies, and Wilderness into Civilized Shapes. We seek articles that focus on contemporary cultural production from specific settler-colonial spaces: Aotearoa-New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Acknowledging the ways these regions have generally been considered together as “white settler colonies” with shared histories as Commonwealth nations, we are assuming, after Annie E Coombes in Rethinking Settler Colonialism, that the similar “administrative structures and civic institutions” provide a basis from which to begin considering the heterogeneous ways in which settler colonials in “Australia,” “Canada,” “New Zealand,” and “South Africa” positioned themselves vis-à-vis Indigenous communities. In other words, the limited geographical scope of this special issue aims to both acknowledge the historical (if problematic) grouping of these nations as settler-colonial societies and encourage different strategies for thinking the connections between them.

We are particularly interested in comparative papers about contemporary/emergent writers and authors/texts not commonly studied either beyond their nations' respective borders or from within the merging perspectives of postcolonialism and ecocriticism. A focus on contemporary writers, in particular young/emerging writers, stems precisely from the fact of their contemporaneity, which enables them to deal with and challenge “postcolonial” and “ecocritical” issues and concepts that have themselves emerged out of decades of postcolonial and ecocritical studies.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
 

Please send 250-word proposals to guest editors Travis V Mason, Elzette Steenkamp, and Lisa Szabo-Jones at PocoEcoIssue@gmail.com. Deadline for submissions is 13 July 2012.