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COPYRIGHT 2008 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
Recent articles have called for postcolonial and ecology-minded criticism to engage with each other, suggesting, too, some of the points of difficulty they might encounter when they do. One point of difficulty lies in how these two forms of criticism develop differing evaluations of discourse and its relation to what counts as real. This essay proposes resolving this difficulty with a materialist apprehension of discourse and suggests that a postcolonial ecocriticism enacted this way might have value generally for African studies. The essay then examines J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K, a novel that has been explored as exemplar of postcolonial ecological thinking, and argues that while Michael K may indeed be shaped by attitudes typical of postcolonial thinking at its inception, it is not a novel with much interest in ecology. The issue for an African ecocriticism, then, is how to grasp the novel's writing of nature. I argue that its historical juncture provides an interpretive context for how the novel subordinates its writing of nature to its postcolonial suspicion of the modern nation state.
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Ecocriticism as a form of literary and cultural critique has an origin in North America, though it moved quickly to Europe, and has tended to reflect the interests and concerns of countries in the North. Yet there is no good reason not to develop an African ecocriticism, one that engages in debating what a society's assigning of significance to nature (in varieties of cultural products) reveals about both its present and past. Such a debate, by opening to question the ways modernity in African contexts transforms human relations with nature and, as a result, the impact of societies on natural environments, would join the struggle to enable social worlds to find more equitable, sustainable, and healthy ways of inhabiting their place--as well as strengthen historical self-understanding. In South Africa, Julia Martin began publishing her ecocritical work in 1987, but it is her 1994 essay to which I am indebted here for the way it proposes reading for nature with an awareness of colonial history. Building on her work while exploring how ecocriticism might fit with postcolonial critique, I consider how J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K, set in South Africa, can be read ecocritically from and for South Africa. Ecocriticism, if it is to pose African questions and find African answers, will need to be rooted in local (regional, national) concern for social life and its natural environment. It will need, too, to work from an understanding of the complexity of African pasts, taking into account the variety in African responses to currents of modernity that reached Africa from Europe initially, but that now influence Africa from multiple centers, European, American, and now Asian, in the present form of the globalizing economy. It is this history of Africa's insertion into a globalizing modernity that indicates the need for an African ecocriticism to engage with one or another form of postcolonial critique, understood broadly to designate "critical discourses which thematize issues emerging from colonial relations and their aftermath, covering a long historical span (including the present)" (Shohat 99).
In developing this postcolonial focus, an African ecocriticism would differentiate itself from ecocriticism in the North, which has (for whatever reasons) either not felt compelled to engage with the consequences of European colonialism or found the available forms of postcolonial criticism to be inconsistent with ecocritical goals and strategies. Two recent articles (by Nixon and Huggan) explore how postcolonial critique and ecocriticism thus far have developed along paths distant from each other, and both writers call for increased dialogue so that each can enrich the other's critical language. Rob Nixon, in his article, identifies and explores "four main schisms between the dominant concerns of postcolonialists and ecocritics" (2235). These "schisms" he defines in terms that might be called topical or value-based (for example, where ecocriticism has valued an ethic of place, which emphasizes care for rooted communities, postcolonialism has valued perspectives deriving from displacement) and suggests, through his exploration of these schisms, forms of dialogue that might result in a "rapprochement" (247). Graham Huggan in his article comments similarly on the lack of dialogue between postcolonial critics and ecocritics and suggests a list of "overlapping fields" in which that dialogue might usefully take place. Both essays offer much that could be fruitful in bringing together concern for both people and nonhuman life in the wake of European expansion from the fifteenth century on. Neither essay though, while identifying postcolonial critique's reliance on post-structuralist understandings of language, engages with the problems (epistemological, ontological) that this reliance may have for any such rapprochement. For an ecocriticism developing within African contexts, where issues of linguistic and cultural diversity have political weight, strategies that work to resolve these problems will need articulation. For this reason I turn to an article by Dominic Head, "The (Im)possibility of Ecocriticism," valuable for how it engages these epistemological and ontological questions--and which reads Michael K as illustrative of the thinking he offers in response.
Publication of Head's article followed his book on Coetzee by a year and it is clear that his exploration of ecocriticism's "(im)possibility" draws on the book's chapter on Michael K. While I will refer to both publications when I turn to the novel, for the moment I focus only on the article, in which Head points to how ecocritics have tended, in the words of the introduction to the first ecocritical anthology, The Ecocriticism Reader, to "condemn post-structuralism for its seeming denial of a physical ground of meaning" (Glotfelty and Fromm xxvii). Yet, Head is aware that postcolonial critique (since Edward Said's groundbreaking Orientalism) has drawn theoretical potency (as well as ethical and political value) from poststructuralist understandings of language and culture. In a globalized, diverse world, in which people struggle against cultural and economic barriers inherited from worlds influenced by European colonial activity, such understandings support a progressive quest for democratic inclusiveness. So, for Head, postcolonial thinking (which he reads as part of a larger postmodern project for how it "decenters" the Western subject) has value precisely for the way it draws power from the idea of meaning's endless provisionality. And it is this idea of ungrounded significance that ecocritics condemn for being radically inconsistent with their defining commitment, that we attend to what can be known about the natural environment and our relation to it, that we acknowledge how (quoting Lawrence Buell) "human affairs are.[...] in fundamental ways subject to regulation by the [natural] environment" ("The (Im)possibility" 33). Postcolonial thinking would of course question the claim of any "we" to "know nature." The linguistic codes in which claims would be made, the relations to power in the modern world, are too diverse to sustain uncritical use of the first person. Moreover, nonhuman nature, lacking an equivalent to human linguistic codes, does not speak. It has to be spoken for by the same humans who are de-centered as speaking subjects. Nonhuman nature can quite obviously, in its own ways, signify (dogs growl, rising waters threaten houses and wild animals, etc.), but nature cannot either authorize or dispute a translation (though it can behave in such a way as to indicate an interpreter got it wrong). It is considerations such as these, which suggest a lack of intellectual coherence between the postcolonial and Green projects (together with his unwillingness to discard either of his political commitments), that lead Head to conclude that ecocriticism is "(im)possible" (38).
Head reads Michael K as a novel that illustrates his solution for negotiating this "(im)possibility," a solution that proposes grasping the textuality of literature while simultaneously "pursu[ing] ecological issues"--which deal, by definition, with what is extratextual (31). For Head Michael K is "one of those postmodernist novels which requires us to revisit the effects of textuality" by delivering, within an overall self-reflexivity, narrative elements ("the business of gardening," for example) that gesture towards a materiality, elusive but important, and it thereby serves to warn of the "dangers of over-textualization" (34, 37). K's gardening, which Head interprets as signifying "an idea of the literal," belongs, in this way of reading, to a code that the narrative's dominant code (articulating poststructuralist ideas of the linguistic construction of meaning) can gesture towards but cannot absorb (37). To this same code belongs (in significant part) the novel's central character, interpreted (following Derek Wright) as "less a man than a spirit of ecological endurance," and so K has value for likewise representing (in part) a spirit to which the text can only allude (35, 37). By attending to these intimations of the material, the literal, that the dominant code elaborating ideas of "textuality" cannot absorb, Head can then read the novel as being about ecology, necessarily extratextual. And by reading the novel's overall self-reflexiveness as a "formal provisionality" characteristic of postcolonial literature, Head reads K's "elusiveness" and "endurance" as challenging not only overtextualization, but a politics based on Western certitudes that has marginalized both people and ecology (37). Yet by essay's end, Head returns to admitting the limitations of this attention to "double-coding." Nature, for Head, has necessarily to be nature-signified, a discursive construct, and nature-as-literal is not exempt from this rule. By defining "the implications of postmodernity" the way that he does, he has to admit that they "would seem to necessitate a compromise of ecocentric values" (38).
Head's solution to the problem he outlines and his reading of Michael K have, I believe, real value and have influenced the thinking in this essay. But it might be more fruitful to attempt reconciling ecocriticism and postcolonial critique by taking into account (more than his "focus on textuality" and reading for "double-coding" permits) the complex interplay of social history with the natural world, and how language both shapes and reveals such interactions. Discourse stands in arbitrary but also power-laden relation to the material world but not all discourses are equal in guiding societies to interact well with earth's biophysical processes or to address inequities among human populations and the attendant...
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