Black Jungle, Beautiful Forest: A Postcolonial, Green Geocriticism of the Indian Sundarbans

Abstract

In the field of literary studies, ecocriticism and geocriticism are currently acknowledged as the disciplines that most prominently and consistently engage with the question of human spatiality, examining the connections between ecology, geography, and fictional representations. Risen out of individual scholarly efforts grounded on the critical categories of place (as natural environment) and space (as real-andimagined referential world), they emerged in the early 1990s and at the beginning of the twenty-first century as recognizable branches of literary investigation that bring in a variety of methodologically diverse approaches under a common subject heading and a shared theoretical framework. Given their methodological flexibility and their distinctly exploratory agenda, ecocriticism and geocriticism originate a set of critical practices that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries— for instance, those isolating literature from other nonliterary domains, or the ones that replicate the crisscross of national frontiers—and can be informed by peculiar perspectives, such as the postcolonial angle that will be maintained and emphasized all through this chapter. In fact, postcolonialism is less an independent discipline or a fixed, unitary theory than a “wide-ranging political project”1 that aims at reorganizing Western fields of knowledge formation around issues of (neo)colonial and imperial domination, economic exploitation, and resource dispossession in the so-called Global South (a rather slippery, “antigeographical” label that applies to different microcosms across the North—South hemisphere divide).2