Description
Book SynopsisWhy do we find so many references to nature and the environment in the many Caribbean literary texts that try to come to terms with the contemporary age of globalization? Even when these novels and poems do not seem to be concerned with environmental issues at all, they abound with fragrant, creepy or dark references to flowers, insects, trees, gardens, and mud. This book discusses a range of Anglophone and Dutch-language Caribbean literary texts to propose an answer. It shows that some writers evoke nature to question oppressive notions of what is natural, and what is not, when it comes to race, gender, and desire. Other writers choose to counter the destructive dichotomies of wildness/order, nature/culture, nature/human that marked colonialism. Instead, they represent the environment as a field of interconnectedness, marked by intense semiotic interaction, in which human beings are also implicated. But writing about nature can also be a means to reconnect with the very foundations o
Trade ReviewPostcolonial studies and ecocriticism have never been quite the same since the advent of the new materialism; nor has the relationship between them. Hoving's timely book shows why. -- Graham Huggan, Chair of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures, School of English, University of Leeds
Table of Contents1.Introduction: Writing the Earth in a Globalizing World Part 1: Connectedness 2.Alterity: Trauma, Sexuality, and Nature as the Unspeakable Other 3.The Erotics of Mimesis 4.Are We All Connected? A Critique of Empathy 5.Exclusion: the Outside and the Outsider in Kincaid’s writing Part 2: Diversity 6.Dwelling: Olive Senior’s Assaulted Landscapes 7.Trans-: Nature, Transgression, and Transience in Surinam 8.Diversity: Writers, Multiculturalists and Ecologists in the Netherlands 9.Opacity: On the Dutch Myth of Openness 10.Matter: the Last Word
