Noncommittal Commitment: Alien Spaces of Ecocosmopolitics in Recent World Literature

Abstract

This chapter assesses an open form of ecological thought in select works of late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century literature, a form that is also manifested in contemporary ecocriticism and geocriticism. The comportment toward coexistence—interspecies, international, inter-whatever—in these works is achieved through local yet disorienting ecologies of tradition, language, and immanent placeexperience contending with global capital politics, recalling in fact a resistance to structural location that Doreen Massey calls the “dislocation which makes politics possible.”1 The insouciant preponderance of this ecological/economic space reflects Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects that exceed measurable effects, do not translate to scientific scales, and “viscously” bind to object actors even more aggressively in response to resistance.2 The works considered show a political form of ecocosmopolitical interspecies (interobjectal) poetics that defamiliarize more than just literary experience and suggest an intricate, robust, and meaningful ecology a comparative space/place “relativism” should otherwise preclude.