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List of contents
Chapter 1
Thinking about Transcultural Ecocriticism: Space, Scale and Translation
Stuart Cooke and Peter Denney
PART A: Planetary Localities
Chapter 2
Urban Narrative and Climate Change
Ursula K. Heise
Chapter 3
Scaling Down Our Imagination of the Human: Ted Chiang and the Fable of Extinction
Chris Danta
Chapter 4
‘Re-enchanting the world’ from Mozambique: the African Anthropocene and Mia Couto’s poetics of the planet
Meg Samuelson
Chapter 5
Ecological Imaginations in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction
Mengtian Sun
PART B: Beyond the Romantic Frontier
Chapter 6
The Colonial Translation of Natures
Alan Bewell
Chapter 7
Sensing Empire: Travel Writing, Picturesque Taste and British Perceptions of the Indian Sensory Environment
Peter Denney
Chapter 8
The Dark Side of Romantic Dendrophilia
Ve-Yin Tee
Chapter 9
Shaping Selves and Spaces: Romanticism, Botany and South-West Western Australia
Jessica White
PART C: Decolonial Poetics
Chapter 10
Transcultural Ecopoetics and Decoloniality in meenamatta lena puellakanny: Meenamatta Water Country Discussion
Peter Minter
Chapter 11
Theorising Decolonised Literary Environments
Stephen Muecke
Chapter 12
Placing Invisible Women: Environment, Space and Power in Two Works by Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim
Maia Gunn Watkinson
Chapter 13
Geoterritorial Island Poetics, or Transcultural Composition with a Wetland in Southern Chile
Stuart Cooke, with Juan Paulo Huirimilla Oyarzo
Index
About the author
Stuart Cooke is Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Griffith University, Australia.Peter Denney is Senior Lecturer in History at Griffith University, Australia.
Summary
Bringing together decolonial, Romantic and global literature perspectives, Transcultural Ecocriticism explores innovative new directions for the field of environmental literary studies. By examining these literatures across a range of geographical locations and historical periods – from Romantic period travel writing to Chinese science fiction and Aboriginal Australian poetry – the book makes a compelling case for the need for ecocriticism to competently translate between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, planetary and local, and contemporary and pre-modern perspectives. Leading scholars from Australasia and North America explore links between Indigenous knowledges, Romanticism, globalisation, avant-garde poetics and critical theory in order to chart tensions as well as affinities between these discourses in a variety of genres of environmental representation, including science fiction, poetry, colonial natural history and oral narrative.
Foreword
Leading scholars explore new perspectives from indigenous, Romantic and world literary studies approaches to transcultural ecocriticism.
Additional text
Containing essays predominantly by Australians but including scholarship from around the Pacific Rim and beyond, Transcultural Ecocriticism illuminates the environmental dimensions of literary works from Vietnam, Mozambique, China, the U.S., Chile, Britain, and India, as well as Australia, with generous representation of Indigenous cultures. The genres considered are also diverse, as the authors examine the resources for environmentalism and environmental justice of fables, fantasy, science fiction, oral traditions, travel writing, novels, and poems. The thinking here is indeed transcultural, linking carefully situated knowledges to one another as well as to global concerns and planetary responsibilities. Such bringing together of localized particularities with large-scale thinking about global crises, deep time, and planetary space is precisely what’s needed in the environmental humanities now. A section of essays on Romanticism valuably highlights intersections of Romantic thinking about nature with colonial oppression, while another cluster of essays explores recent decolonial projects. Several of these present groundbreaking transcultural collaborations between Anglo-Australian and Indigenous (Aboriginal, Mapuche) artists. These exciting projects demonstrate the transformative and liberatory potential of opening to the eco-philosophies of other cultures. As readers of this important collection are introduced to works and traditions of literature they had not previously known, they will gain appreciation for the powerful resources offered by transcultural ecocriticism, especially those in which Indigenous onto-ecologies are at play, for responding, as Peter Minter observes, “to climate change and, among other things, its liability to regimes of coloniality.”
