Scott Slovic
This new book is the second volume in a two-volume “mini-series” devoted to representing diverse and innovative ecocritical voices from throughout the world, particularly from developing nations (the first volume, Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development, appeared in 2014). The vast majority of existing ecocritical studies, even those which espouse the “postcolonial ecocritical” perspective, operate within a first-world sensibility, speaking on behalf of subalternized human communities and degraded landscapes without actually eliciting the voices of the impacted communities. We have sought in Ecocriticism of the Global South to allow scholars from (or intimately familiar with) underrepresented regions to “write back” to the world’s centers of political and military and economic power, expressing views of the intersections of nature and culture from the perspective of developing countries. This approach highlights what activist and writer Vandana Shiva has described as the relationship between “ecology and the politics of survival,” showing both commonalities and local idiosyncrasies by juxtaposing such countries as China and Northern Ireland, New Zealand and Cameroon. The two volumes of the Ecocriticism of the Global South Series point to the need for further cultivation of the environmental humanities in regions of the world that are, essentially, the front line of the human struggle to invent sustainable and just civilizations on an imperiled planet.
