‘Green Postcolonialism’ and ‘Postcolonial Green’

Abstract

In an article written in 2004 on the increasing traffic between eco-critical and postcolonial literary studies, Graham Huggan noted that the ‘green’ turn in postcolonialism was in effect a sign of the scholars’ admission that it was impossible to analyse modern imperialism and colonialism without engaging with the massive scale of environmental devastation that they entail (2004, p. 702). This, of course, was another way of say- ing that all colonial and imperial issues were, by their very nature, also environmental issues. Huggan went on to elaborate why eco-critical and postcolonial studies needed each other: whereas the former could help centre the material environment as the primary focus of the latter’s critical perspective, the latter could help combat ‘the tendencies of some Green movements towards Western liberal universalism and “[white] middle-class nature-protection elitism”’ (ibid.) Following this, Huggan suggested five growth areas within this newly configured field of ‘postcolonial green’: environmental activism enhanced by properly analysed ideologies of development; textual practices foregrounding the politics of traditional environmental discourses; a correction of universalist ecological claims; initiation of debate on the rhetorical function and material effects of the discourses of anti-imperialist resistance and intercultural reconciliation; and finally, reinvigoration of utopic thinking in order to assist the global struggle for socio-economic and ecological justice (p. 720).