[Book review of ] Postcolonial ecocriticism:literature,animals,environment by Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin

Abstract

"Postcolonial Ecocriticism takes up the challenge of bringing together two pairs of standoffish, if not openly antagonistic, critical perspectives: postcolonialism vs. ecocriticism, and ecology vs. “zoocriticism,” as the authors term the cultural study of animals. Dialogue between the first two, signaled in the book’s title, has been underway for a while, with a number of critics working to articulate the space between postcolonial and environmental studies (Cilano and Deloughrey, Huggan, Huggan and Tiffin, Nixon). The relationship between ecology and animals, which might seem intuitively more obvious, has been more fraught, for reasons explained by the narrator of J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999): In the ecological vision, the salmon and the river-weeds and the water-insects interact in a great, complex dance with the earth and the weather. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In the dance, each organism has a role: it is these multiple roles, rather than the particular beings who play them, that participate in the dance. As for actual role-players, as long as they are self-renewing, as long as they keep coming forward, we need pay them no heed. (53-54) The scandal of that omission, which is the subject of Coetzee’s novel, is a central concern in Huggan and Tiffin’s study. While the authors do not completely reconcile animals and ecology (the first nearly two-thirds of their book is focused on “Postcolonialism and the Environment,” the second third on “Zoocriticism and the Postcolonial,” with a final short, intriguing Postscript titled “After Nature”) they make a compelling case that the struggle for “a genuinely post-imperial, environmentally based conception of community” (6) must be fought on all fronts."(pg 1)