Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English

The talk of a catastrophic contemporary environmental crisis is all around us. Yet the relationship between such a crises and literary and cultural forms remains relatively unexamined. This book offers a way to think about this relationship by reading a number of key contemporary Indian novels alongside accounts of the severely stressed ecology and environment of the country. In doing so, postcolonial environments also suggests a new alignment between the theoretical fields of postcolonial and environmental studies. In showing how such an alignment can provide us with a materialist and historicist account of environments of cultures and cultures of environment, the book makes an original contribution to the emergent area of green postcolonialism.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction From Earth Day to Earth Summits 'Green Postcolonialism' and 'Postcolonial Green' Towards Eco-Materialism The River and the Dance: Arundhati Roy Water/Land: Amitav Ghosh Dead Air: Indra Sinha 'Blood on my water': Ruchir Joshi Endnotes References Index

About the Author :
UPAMANYU PABLO MUKHERJEE was born in Calcutta, India, and educated there. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to study in Oxford, UK, and went on to teach at Cambridge, Newcastle and Warwick Universities. He is the author of Crime Fiction and Empire (2005).

Review :
'Postcolonial Environments makes a valuable contribution both to the emerging field of postcolonial ecocriticism and to the established field of Indian English literature, the two main fields combined in Mukherjee's timely and informative book.' - Graham Huggan, Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures, Leeds University, UK 'Pablo Mukherjee's Postcolonial Environments is an innovative and timely book which builds a critical genealogy of the rapidly expanding field of postcolonial ecocriticism and suggests new directions for the future. As the first book to place South Asian literature in a dialogue with postcolonial ecocriticism, Mukherjee makes a powerful and convincing argument for a historical materialist method which he terms 'eco-materialist aesthetics.' This is a compelling model of how to approach the unity of humans and nature, the mediating function of labor, and how the materiality of the environment enables our cultural activity. Building upon Marx's ideas on how labor connects humans to the environment and how capitalism enables nature's destruction, Mukherjee's work provides a piercing critique of how forms of empire, past and present, reflect a 'state of permanent war on the global environment' His exploration of the uneven spatial and cultural development of postcolonial experience leads to a perceptive ability to focus on the stylistic and formal innovations within texts that speak more accurately to an adaptive model of 'eco-materialism.' This is a groundbreaking and original book, one that is destined to change the way we speak of the material history and representation of postcolonial environments.' - Elizabeth deLoughrey, Associate Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles, USA