| Zusammenfassung |
Research Context: 'Environment' is a truly global buzzword now, appearing daily in everything from tabloid frontpages to U.N. reports. Yet, while one U.S. politician is acclaimed as a 'green warrior', others deny the very reality of 'global warming'; Indian and Chinese leaders decry 'conservationist concerns' and assert their nation's right to develop but activists from their own countries expose the massive environmental and social degradation that has resulted from such 'development'. These debates have marked those fields in the humanities and social sciences that claim urgent relevance to the global condition - such as environmental and postcolonial studies. Yet, until very recently, both these areas were dominated by concepts that grew out of the historical and environmental events of the 'global north'. Very little of the specificities of the 'global south' was used to challenge, test or modify these conceptual models. But this situation is fast changing, and both environmental and postcolonial studies now stand on the verge of rapid transformation. For example, 'deep ecological' concepts of nature are now giving way to 'social ecological' concepts arising out of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Again, 'postcolonial studies' is now questioning its founding concepts of migration, culture, history, nature by integrating an environmental component into all these enquiries. My research project aims to simultaneously account for these transformations, bring 'social ecology' and cultural studies into dialogue with each other and provide a theoretical model that can be used to investigate the relationship between the actually existing environmental facts and the cultural responses to it in the 'postcolonial' world. I take one such cultural response - the contemporary Indian novel in English, in order to illustrate my arguments. My analysis shows that environment is of key thematic and formal importance to this literature. The novels I look at repeatedly place the issues of human migration, city slums, deforestation, natural catastrophes, toxicity, in short, 'southern' environmental issues at the heart of their stories. At the same time, in order to encompass this vast and shifting canvass, they enter into conversations and exchanges with other cultural forms that surround them, such as theatre, music, films. By doing this, they produce formal innovations that separate them from canonical Euroepan and north American novels. In other words, it is contemporary Indian environmental reality that produce the exotic flair that is routinely attributed to Indian English language novels. I conclude the study by showing that this model of the relationship between environment, culture and history can also be applied to Africa and Latin America.\n'Research Questions: In my research project I aim to address a number of questions arising primarily out of the historical and material realities of the 'global south'- what is the relationship between the 'environmental' facts of deforestation, droughts, internal migration, urban slums, soil toxicity and the symbolic act we call literature? Is there a structural relationship between environment realities and cultural forms? If so, can we use the relationship between the environment and cultures of one area of the 'global south', contemporary india, as a model that will be relevant to the erst of the world? \nResearch Outputs: I will produce a monograph-length study titled 'Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English', which is contracted to be delivered to the publisher Palgrave Macmillan in March 2009 for publication later that year. \nResearch Method: I will use historical archives, scientific studies, government policy documents and literary/cultural texts to show how environmental facts are understood, and how the specific form and structure of literary and cultural texts are shaped by this understanding. |
