Between Glaciers and Fossils: Landscape, Literature and the Anthropocene in Pakistan

Abstract

Arguing for an expansion of the subject of ecocriticism beyond climate change fiction, this essay examines strategies of representation of vernacular landscapes in contemporary Anglophone South Asian literature from Pakistan and Bangladesh. It suggests that recent writing by Uzma Aslam Khan, Tahmima Anam and Kamila Shamsie recuperates Pakistani landscape from its imbrication within colonial and post 9/11 spatial discourses, enabling a zoecentric re-ordering of regional history, complicating ideas of authenticity, and engaging with deep history in ways that furnish individual affective investments in landscape instead of reiterating the difference-flattening tendency of species-thinking. Finally, it attempts to articulate the geological turn precipitated by the notion of the Anthropocene with frameworks of postcolonial ecocriticism to adapt them to specific contexts in South Asia.

Keywords:

• Postcolonial ecocriticism
• Anthropocene fiction
• Anglophone Pakistani literature

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Chakrabarty defines a zoecentric approach as that which “[b]y introducing new questions of scale—astronomical scales for space, geological scales for time, and scales of evolutionary time for the history of life—…places humans firmly within a larger view of life and planetary dynamics,” thus functioning “at a tangent to the completely homocentric narrative of globalization” (2015, 154–155).

2 Kabir fashions the analytical lens of the “new pastoral,” situating it within a history of “landscape fetishization” and distinguishing it from the imperial pastoralism exemplified by the early high altitude photographs of Samuel Bourke and John Burke on the one hand, and the postcolonial pastoral inaugurated by the writings of Jawaharlal Nehru on the other, in order to unpack the “the strategic use of environmentalist tropes” by contemporary Kashmiri cultural producers to reclaim for Kashmiris the intensely contested valley currently administered by India (2016, 205).

3 Kamila Shamsie, “Rose Wohlgemuth Weisman Women’s Voices Lecture – Mourning for Lost Art,” Case Western Reserve University, April 5, 2016, YouTube Video 1:16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5WsTgPZcq0&t=125s.

4 For instance, the film Dunkirk (2017) has been criticised for whitewashing the role of South Asian soldiers. See: Singh, Sunny. “Why the lack of Indian and African faces in Dunkirk matters.” The Guardian. August 1, 2017.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Diviani Chaudhuri

Diviani Chaudhuri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Shiv Nadar University, India.