Short description:

Climate Change, Ecological Catastrophe, and the Contemporary Novel displaces conventional ways of thinking about the relationship between the mundane and the catastrophic and promotes greater dialogue between the largely siloed fields of postcolonial, Indigenous, and disaster studies.

Long description:

Climate Change, Ecological Catastrophe, and the Contemporary Novel responds to the critical need for transdisciplinary research on the relationship between colonialism and catastrophe. It represents the first sustained analysis of the connection between colonial legacy and present-day ecological catastrophe in postcolonial fiction. Analyzing contemporary South Asian and South Pacific novels that grapple with climate change and catastrophe, environmental exploitation and instability, and human-nonhuman relationships in degraded environments, it offers a much-needed corrective to dominant narratives about climate, crisis, and the everyday.

Highlighting the contributions of literary fiction from the postcolonial South to the growing field of the environmental humanities, this book reconsiders the novel?s relationship with climate change and the contemporary environmental imaginary. Counter to dominant current theoretical discourses, it demonstrates that the novel form is ideally suited to literary and imaginative engagements with climate change and ecological catastrophe. The six case studies it examines connect contemporary ecological vulnerability to colonial legacies, reveal the critical role animals and the environment play in literary imaginations of post-catastrophe recovery, and together constellate a decolonial perspective on ecological catastrophe in the era of climate change. Drawing on the work of Indigenous authors and scholars who write about and against the Anthropocene, this book displaces conventional ways of thinking about the relationship between the mundane and the catastrophic and promotes greater dialogue between the largely siloed fields of postcolonial, Indigenous, and disaster studies.

"In her first monograph, Climate Change, Ecological Catastrophe, and the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel, Justyna Poray-Wybranowska offers a revised understanding of catastrophe in postcolonial fiction? a timely addition to a recent wealth of publications in the field of postcolonial ecocriticism."

-- Demi Wilton, Loughborough University, UK

?Poray-Wybranowska?s Climate Change, Ecological Catastrophe, and the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel is scholarly, with a well-articulated argument supported succinctly by relevant theory? This is an avenue of enquiry of increasing importance that has the potential to connect cross-disciplinarily with studies in social theory, ecocriticism, literatures of climate change, and interdisciplinary studies across the environmental humanities.?

--Kate Judith, University of Southern Queensland, Australia

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Chapter 1: Reading Catastrophe through Postcolonialism, Ecocriticism, and Animal Studies

Chapter 2: Catastrophe, Vulnerability, and Human Relationships

Part 1: Kiran Desai?s The Inheritance of Loss

Part 2: Kim Scott?s Benang: From the Heart

Chapter 3: Catastrophe and Human-Nonhuman Relationships in Degraded Environments

Part 1: Uzma Aslam Khan?s Thinner than Skin

Part 2: Alexis Wright?s Carpentaria

Chapter 4: Land Justice, Resistance, Recovery

Part 1: Amitav Ghosh?s The Hungry Tide

Part 2: Patricia Grace?s Potiki

Conclusion