Towards an ecocritical postcolonialism: Val Plumwood’s Environmental Culture in dialogue with Patrick Chamoiseau

Abstract

This essay participates in the work of synthesizing postcolonialism and ecocriticism by pointing to the texts and approaches that suggest a productive resolution of the tension between these two critical practices. At the heart of my discussion is Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002), by the Australian ecophilosopher Val Plumwood, which is a work that offers a corrective to critical postcolonialism’s “over‐culturalised sensibility”. Read in conjunction with a number of works by Martinican novelist and essayist Patrick Chamoiseau, Plumwood’s ecophilosophical insights into the distribution of capitalism’s negative externalities, the persistence of the centre/periphery model of politics, and the consequences of remoteness allow for readings that account not just for the human effects of the post/colonial condition but also for the effects on the non‐human world.

Keywords:

• postcolonialism
• ecocriticism
• Val Plumwood
• Patrick Chamoiseau
• negative externalities
• centre/periphery
• remoteness
• creolization
• hybridity
• literature of place

Notes

1. Witness the “Boundaries and Limits of Postcolonialism” conference, organized in December 2006 by the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies and the Winthrop‐King Institute for French and Francophone Studies, which was the occasion of my first articulation of this argument.

2. See Glissant’s Poétique de la relation (1990), Traité du tout‐monde (1997), and La Cohée du Lamentin (2005). I insist on Glissant for two reasons: first, because he is often positioned as the “maître penseur” of the global process of creolization; second, Patrick Chamoiseau, the author on whom this essay focuses, owes a substantial intellectual debt to Glissant but nonetheless provides a specified counterpoint (Créolité) to the latter’s promotion of untethered creolization.

3. Gayatri Spivak, who does indeed write out of an explicitly Marxist framework that has the capitalist master subject as its target, constitutes an exception to this rule. Her work is more attentive to the intersection of ecological and cultural issues than that of most of her avatars.

4. See 〈http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/releases/greenpeace‐condemns‐trafigura〉 for details on this event. Verena Andermatt Conley claims that the Third World, which is too often the privileged site for offloading these externalities, functions as “a chora of capitalism” (30).

5. Unless otherwise noted in the Works cited, all translations are mine. In those cases where translations exist, I have cited from the English‐language version.

6. For a more detailed account of the ecological themes in this novel, see my article “Toutes ces eaux!” (2003).

7. As I completed this essay, I learned of Val Plumwood’s death on 28 February 2008 in her home in Braidwood, Australia, of what was first reported to be a snake bite (this was later corrected in the press to indicate that she died of a stroke). Much was made of the ostensible irony of the ecophilosopher and environmental activist dying at the hand of nature. But Plumwood, who was attacked by a crocodile in 1985 and lived not only to write about it but to argue vehemently against the plan to hunt the crocodile that nearly killed her, had only ever sought the acknowledgement that the human and non‐human worlds were inextricably linked and that, in the long run, man could neither ignore nor transcend his embeddedness in nature. Had she died of a snakebite, I think the irony would have been lost on her …