Graham Huggan

Perspectives on postcolonial Europe 1

This essay makes a plea for reintroducing Europe into the domain of postcolonial literary and cultural studies, on the grounds not only that postcolonial approaches and methods can be usefully applied to current social, cultural and political trends in contemporary Europe but also that – at least in postcolonial circles – Dipesh Chakrabarty’s passionate call for the “provincialization of Europe” has been heeded only too well. Postcolonialism, it is often said, effectively negates its own prefix; but another way of seeing this is that it looks forward to a time when its own interventionist tactics will no longer be needed; to a time when the neo‐imperial world order it currently describes, and implicitly resists, will have been definitively transformed. A similar idealism informs the notion of “postcolonial Europe” – a notion centred not on the residual figure of the “postcolonial migrant” but on emergent figures like Gilroy’s “Black European”, who are part of a larger process of transition that “may [eventually] take us beyond racialised and racialisable categories of all kinds” (Gilroy, After Empire).

Postcolonial ecocriticism and the limits of Green Romanticism

This essay assesses the emerging alliance between postcolonial criticism and ecocriticism in the light of continuing debates on “Green Romanticism”. It considers what is at stake in contending positions within this debate, what contributions postcolonial writers and thinkers have made to it, and what some of the implications might be of bringing postcolonial criticism and ecocriticism together, both for the reassessment of Romantic ecological legacies and for the “greening” of postcolonial thought.

Introduction: Unscrambling the Arctic

While “scramble” is a useful term to describe the ravaging effects of contemporary neoliberal, political, and economic agendas on a rapidly changing Arctic, it is also reductive, overlooking the fact that the Arctic region—one of the most geographically and culturally diverse on the planet––is the uneven product of multiple, often highly disparate, colonial pasts. This chapter situates the contemporary European Arctic in the context of various scrambles for resources across the circumpolar High North and their reworking of colonial relations. However, it also argues the need for an “unscrambling” of the region and an appropriately critical re-reading of the discourses of alarmism and opportunism that underlie popular, often media-driven configurations of the “New North.”

Last whales: Eschatology, extinction, and the cetacean imaginary in Winton and Pash

Few of the earth’s creatures capture the popular imagination quite like the whale, which has come to serve as an ambivalent figure for both salvation and perdition, whether the moral dramas that unfold around it are seen in religious (eschatological) or scientific (ecological) terms. Whales are at once signifiers for extinction, pointing to the threat of planetary destruction, and signifiers for redemption, in which the ongoing environmentalist campaign for protection doubles as a human struggle to save us from ourselves. This article looks at two contemporary Australian literary texts, Tim Winton’s Shallows (1985) and Chris Pash’s The Last Whale (2008), both of which explore competing extinction scenarios: the extinction of whales; the extinction of the whaling industry; and the extinction of whaling as a way of life. Given the further possibility of human self-extinction, the article argues that a new cetacean imaginary is needed in which whales are seen as complex manifestations of a life that co-exists with humanity, but is neither reducible to human understandings of history nor to the various futures — or non-futures — that human beings might imagine for themselves.

Back to the future: the ‘new nature writing,’ ecological boredom, and the recall of the wild

Abstract The “new nature writing” has been seen as a response, especially in the United Kingdom, to the growing sense that earlier paradigms of nature and nature writing are no longer applicable to current geographical and environmental conditions. At the same time, some writers who have been associated with the “new nature writing” dislike the term, criticizing it for its residual parochialism, its continuing class and gender biases, and its paradoxical adherence to the very categories – particularly wildness – it wishes to confront. This article does not set out to dismiss the “new nature writing” or to assess which writers might be the best fit with it; instead, it looks at its indebtedness to the earlier literary and cultural traditions it claims to interrogate and deconstruct. This debt is often expressed in terms of belatedness, whether acknowledged or not, in relation to earlier notions of wilderness and wildness – inherently slippery categories that multiply and ramify in the “new nature writing,” which has neither managed to dissociate itself from wildness nor to redefine it for our ecologically troubled times.