Why do we find so many references to nature and the environment in
the many Caribbean literary texts that try to come to terms with
the contemporary age of globalization? Even when these novels and
poems do not seem to be concerned with environmental issues at all,
they abound with fragrant, creepy or dark references to flowers,
insects, trees, gardens, and mud. This book discusses a range of
Anglophone and Dutch-language Caribbean literary texts to propose
an answer. It shows that some writers evoke nature to question
oppressive notions of what is natural, and what is not, when it
comes to race, gender, and desire. Other writers choose to counter
the destructive dichotomies of wildness/order, nature/culture,
nature/human that marked colonialism. Instead, they represent the
environment as a field of interconnectedness, marked by intense
semiotic interaction, in which human beings are also implicated.
But writing about nature can also be a means to reconnect with the
very foundations of life itself. In the most dramatic cases,
references to nature evoke an extra-discursive space that then
functions to subvert existing discourses. That space may even mark
the site of the annihilation of discourse, or of the self. These
texts suggest that, in times of globalization, it is only the dark,
queer turn to matter that will free the path to imagining human
existence in a new way. The book's proposal to understand some of
these fascinating texts as an effort to relate to the
mind-baffling, explosive real is inspired by postcolonial trauma
theory, posthumanism, and new materialism. However, Caribbean
literature is a layered practice, that does much more than merely
explore the world's materiality. It works simultaneously as
cultural critique, counter-discourse, and as the manipulation of
affect. This book therefore brings together ecocriticism with
Caribbean and postcolonial studies, the study of globalization,
trauma theory, the study of gender and sexuality, posthumanism and
new materialism, to bring out the full complexity of these wise
texts. Thus, it hopes to show its readers their extraordinary
innovative potential.
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