Welcome Readers,
Nowadays, increasing globalization in the world has resulted in the transcendence of power of even the strongest sovereign countries. This blog is a part of my Sunday Reading activity wherein our professor has assigned the task to discuss the session on ecocriticism conducted on the 10th of November by Devang Nanavati Sir with reference to postcolonialism.
After globalization, the main focus of postcolonial studies has been transferred to environmental studies. Today, Empire has altogether a different meaning, it alludes to something altogether different from those traditional realms that had the worst colonial consequences. For Hardt and Negri, it now ‘establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentred and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers’ (Hardt and Negri, xii)
Environmental conservation has captured global attention for the last five decades, especially after the post-industrial era. Humans have disturbed the environmental components, the ecological factors in different manners. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once claimed that ‘no longer have a postcolonial perspective. I think postcolonial is the day before yesterday’ (Spivak)
For decades now, the environmental activist Vandana Shiva has exposed the connection between colonialism and the destruction of environmental diversity. She argues that the growth of capitalism, and now of trans-national corporations, exacerbated the dynamic begun under colonialism which has destroyed sustainable local cultures; these cultures were also more women-friendly, partly because women’s work was so crucially tied to producing food and fodder. (Loomba, 251) Other women's activist naturalists are more doubtful of such an evaluation of pre-pilgrim societies, which, they point out, were likewise defined and male-centric; notwithstanding, they concur that inquiries of environment and human culture are complicatedly connected. Particularly in the alleged third world, the state, one can't talk about sparing the climate while disregarding the necessities of human lives and networks.
Generally, when we talk about nature, we as a part of culture more often carry our cultural legacy and identity consciously or unconsciously and exclude ourselves from nature because we are representatives of culture which we consider as more ‘refined’ and polished. So this nature-culture divide has to be bridged somewhere. Eco historians like Ramachandra Guha in his book titled ‘Ecology and Equity’ analyses the use and abuse of nature on the sub-continent to reveal the interconnections of social and environmental conflict on the global scale. The authors Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha argue that the root of this conflict is competition within different social groups and between different economic interests for natural resources. Today, environmental problems have engendered very serious existential implications. Dangerous atmospheric devastation has exhibited the overwhelming impacts of the modern transformation and the liberated quest for capital development.
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