Zelia M. Bora - Narratives of Environmental Challenges in Brazil and India: Losing Nature

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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ISBN 978-1-4985-8114-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4985-8115-8 (electronic)

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To my children Siddharth and Sarita and family in India.

And my dear husband Robert.

In memory of Col. Kailash Bora

In memory of Mrs. Bhagavathy Sivaramakrishnan

Thank you to all contributors for their contributions to this volume. Thank you to Adaylson Wagner Sousa de Vasconcelos for his invaluable editorial assistance with the project. Thank you for Lexington Publishers, Douglas Vakoch, Nick Johns, and Lindsey Falk for their continuing intellectual support of my work.

Murali Sivaramakrishnan

Ecological Criticism: Theory, Significance, Difference

The rising concern for the environment and the human-nature nexus has taken the center stage in almost all debates and forums in the presentacademic or otherwise. The degradation of the environment and the power that humans exert on it has been much contested and debated upon. Although in the geological time scale, human civilization has been around only for a few thousand years, even within that short span of time we have managed to create quite a disorder in ecological balance by etching our dominance over nature. Perhaps the rapid increase of human population and the unbridled pace of economic and industrial development has left us battling with other species for limited resources. Ancient human was a hunter and food gatherer who turned to and depended upon nature for survival; thus essentially human beings are allied closely to the eco-system and dependent on it. This living connection with our natural environment has changed little despite our cultural fabric. Literary narratives could be pointers towards minimizing the break as is evidenced in much of the texts from time immemorial from cultures and communities diverse and different.

When this project on environment and water was floated the major point raised by many a contributor was whether we needed to focus on literature and theory or on hard core issues of environment. As editors we were also concerned with similar issues: are we heading toward a collection of articles with a common theme of ecology and critical theory, or are we trying to propose a specific way of looking at literature and the world of the present which may or may not be common to all the authors included? Could it also lead toward a newer perception of the literary as we understand it in todays world? Or would the whole project be focused on policy and development issues? In most ways, I guess, many of these perceptions would be suitable, since the issue asked prospective authors to compose essays on new directions in ecocritical theorizing with environment, water, and forests in particular.

In the field of literary and cultural theory ecocriticism might be a relatively new entrant with perhaps conflicting methodological stances, unlike, say, Marxist or Feminist standpoints, or even Queer theories.

Given its diversity of perceptions, we do have to recognize the academic orientation of ecocriticism from its inception had been west-bound, specifically Americanwhile theorization that followed in its wake had incorporated several factors like issues in poststructuralism, globalization, and ecoterrorism, to mention only a few in the light of emerging cultural situations. Now, whatever positions ideological or otherwise that one were to take, it is needless to reiterate the fact that ecocriticism is closely bound to theory in the west and east alike. Perhaps, as Patrick Murphy has argued, it is a little closer to the Bakhtinian (see Murphy, 2013, p. 11) notions of answerability:

It takes very little imagination to see how answerabilty imposes obligations on the ecocritic in relation to environmental issues, representations of ecology, and the quality and functionality of artistic images of nature, environments, ecologies, and human practices.