ENGLISH 607.46/517.66 - Nomads and Settlers: Postcolonial Ecologies
Instructor: Dr. Pamela Banting
Wednesday, 14:00 - 16:30
Mail to: pbanting [at] ucalgary [dot] ca
In Leaning on the Wind: Under the Spell of the Great Chinook Sid Marty links the early settlement of southern Alberta with that in other parts of the British Commonwealth by referring to it as "this raj on the range." The first chapter of Rudy Wiebe's novel A Discovery of Strangers, "The Animals in That Country," is written from the perspective of the animals of the Arctic at point of contact with European explorers. Wiebe writes: "About that time some of the animals did begin to hear strange noises, bits of shriek and hammer above the wavering roar of rapids or the steady flagellation of wind. These were strangers, so different, so blatantly loud the caribou themselves could not help hearing them long before they needed to be smelled, and some animals drifted around to see what made the trees in one place scream and smash that way, the rocks clang."
In this course we will examine literary and theoretical texts in the emergent field of postcolonial ecocriticism, and the fraught processes of colonial encounter, settlement and displacement, sometimes referred to as re-settlement. We will explore ecological imperialism and topics in postcolonial ecocriticism such as struggles over land and property rights, clashes between nomadic and settlement ideologies and peoples, conflicting notions and significations of place, the ecological consequences of 'development,' adventure- and eco-tourism, implications of the 'colonial cringe' with regard to ecological engagement, etc. Questions to be considered include the following: How do nomads and settlers depict the spatial organization of place? Who are the nomads, and who are the settlers? How do postcolonial studies' interrogation of colonial discourses and insistence on historicity exert pressure on ecocriticism's seeming reluctance to historicize environmental realities? In what ways have the historical changes wrought by colonization, decolonization, and globalization affected human relationships to the non-human world? In turn, in what ways does inclusion of the non-human in ecocritical studies work alongside or perhaps against postcolonial models of human agency? Can literary texts can ever succeed in giving agency to non-human actors or in conveying a non-human 'voice'? How can the ecocritical concern with wilderness (biocentrism, non-anthropocentrism) be reconciled with the more human-centered concerns of the environmental justice movement? How can the interests of endangered species be reconciled with those of endangered people? Captivity narratives: how are zoos, aquaria and botanical gardens represented in postcolonial literature? Can we map the ‘points of contact' between postcolonialism and ecocriticism? How can the tensions between scholarship and activism, which are inherent in both postcolonialism and ecocriticism, be negotiated?
Texts may be chosen from the following list:
Helen Tiffin and Graham Huggan, Postcolonial Ecocriticism (Routledge, in press)
Thomas R. Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (excerpts)
J. Edward Chamberlin, If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground
George Colpitts, Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940 (selections)
John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (selections)
Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (selected readings)
Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World
Frederick Philip Grove, Settlers of the Marsh
Kate Grenville, The Secret River
Harry Robinson, Write It on Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller
Rabbit-Proof Fence (film)
Les Murray, Translations from the Natural World (full text available from LION database)
Don McKay, Camber
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
Bruce Chatwin, Songlines
Barbara Gowdy, The White Bone
Rudy Wiebe, A Discovery of Strangers
Fred Bodsworth, Last of the Curlews
Karsten Heuer, Being Caribou
