Ecological readings of French Caribbean literature provide valuable insight into the relations between the landscape and subjectivity at the same time as they foreground crucial epistemological and aesthetic underpinnings of the region's cultural production. From the metaphorical stance exemplified by Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant and the Créolistes to the gendered spaces of knowledge formation illustrated by Gisèle Pineau and Maryse Condé, the connections between the land and identity, historical coercion and individual empowerment, invite readers to reassess notions of how the land inscribes the experience of colonization. Urban, rural, and natural environments thus delineate the literary landscape of the French Caribbean while shedding light on patterns of political, social, and cultural domination.

Much critical attention has been given to the correlation between nature, culture, and history through the lens of postcolonial studies. Whereas Rob Nixon outlines the conditions for the "mutual distrust" between the fields of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies in his 2005 essay "Environmentalism and Postcolonialism," recent volumes contextualize these two approaches as a key means of historicizing the ways in which the land expresses, translates, and manifests colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial power structures. Yet despite the increased awareness of the landscape's crucial role in helping us understand the lasting effects of colonialism, Francophone Caribbean literature has remained underrepresented in the field of postcolonial ecocriticism.

This panel thus seeks to engage questions about the role of ecology in literature from the French Caribbean. How do evocations of urban, rural, and natural landscapes represent the colonial past? How does an ecocritical perspective expand upon traditional conceptions of space, place, and time? How do ecological images transform metaphysical notions of being as well as manifest postcolonial conditions of vulnerability and agency?

Please contact lconnell@westga.edu for any questions regarding this panel. To submit a proposal, please visit http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla.html