It is curious, then, that influential texts in ecocriticism have little to say about the unique place of the Caribbean in histories of environment and climate. In the writing of David Farrier or Amitav Ghosh, the Caribbean is not just marginalized but erased entirely. This erasure is also evident in most of the leading anthologies on literary ecocriticism, including Ecocriticism (Greg Garrard, Routledge, 2nd ed. 2012) and Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader (Ken Hiltner, Routledge 2014). While there are some edited collections of essays addressing the topic, such as Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson and George B. Handley’s 2005 book Caribbean Literature and Environment: Between Nature and Culture and Chris Campbell and Michael Nesbitt's The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics (Liverpool University Press 2016), only a handful of the essays in either of these anthologies treat Caribbean women’s writing as ecocritical literature or read Caribbean literature with Caribbean feminism’s important contributions to environmental justice in mind.
As climate change exacerbates historic injustices such as racism, sexism, colonialism and capitalist exploitation, literary scholars who engage in Caribbean studies and ecocriticism such as Sonya Posmentier and Monique Allewaert remind us that theoretical and literary traditions from the small island nations of the Caribbean uniquely reflect present demands for environmental justice across the globe. This panel comes together around questions of ecology, environmental justice, and Caribbean feminisms, connections that scholars have only recently begun to chart. It does so with the understanding that Caribbean feminist writing acts as a necessary theoretical corrective to the universalizing impulses of contemporary ecocriticism.
Our three presenters treat the topic by examining poetry and prose, thus expanding ecocriticism beyond the scope of a narrow aesthetics of ecopoetics. Lubabah Chowdhury’s paper, titled “Afro-Asian Intimacies and Caribbean Geographies in Brenda Flanagan's You Alone Are Dancing,” examines the importance of geography, setting and narrative style in Flanagan's 1990 novel about the fictional village of Rosehill, which is threatened by the post-independence government's decision to sell the land to an American oil company. She will discuss how both the novel imagines the oil field as a contact zone that, while detrimental to the characters’ livelihoods and well-being, nonetheless presses characters together in opposition to neo-colonial interests.
Natalie Catasús’s paper, titled “Mimicking Seas, Malefic Mirrors: Suzanne Roussi Césaire’s Ecopoetic Theory of Caribbean Subjectivity,” argues that Roussi Césaire proposes an ecologically grounded theory of Caribbean subject formation. Distinct from Frantz Fanon’s more widely known theories on the racialized subject, her ecopoetic method deploys metaphors of mimicry and camouflage and takes a relational discursive approach to writing about Caribbean space. In particular, her engagement with surrealism and psychoanalysis generatively complicates Eurocentric Enlightenment notions of seeing as knowing and displaces the dominance of a visual regime in favor of a multisensory relationship between self, place, and space.
Christine Okoth’s paper “Feminism, Migration, and the Ecological Turn Inwards” proposes that we read Caribbean women’s writing from the 1970s and 1980s as fictions which rewrite the economic and political trajectories of resource nationalism in the Black Atlantic world. Focusing in particular on works by Michelle Cliff and Maryse Condé, this paper argues that their interest in migration and travel should be understood not as contemplations on belonging and identity but as a theorization of the geopolitical realignments taking place in the postcolonial era. Running parallel to failed political attempts which reimagined the relationship between former colonial economies in Europe and export oriented economies of the Caribbean and Africa, these literary texts stage the renegotiation of the global economic order through their protagonist’s capricious international movements and their interest in the physical composition of landscape.