Postcolonial ecocriticism or environmental theory has been a flourishing field of inquiry over the past two decades. Literary critics have been using this theory to examine the complex relationship between literature, culture, and the environment in diverse global Anglophone or postcolonial novels. With the intensification of globalization in the 1990s, there has been an explosion of local environmental movements in the global south protesting neoliberal capitalist agendas, despite their respective governments’ promises of development, modernity, and progress in order to “catch up” with the West. These local struggles have arisen out of specific socio-historical circumstances and differ vastly from each other. Nevertheless, they share some common concerns: environmental destruction, grassroots democracy, sustainable development, human rights, local land rights, marginal voice and collectivity, cultural identity, and global social and environmental justice, among others. While postcolonial theory has always trenchantly critiqued colonialism, imperialism, Western modernity or capitalist modernity, and their destructive effects on local cultures and people, some crucial aspects of development or modernization, the environment, the commons, and the human-animal relationships and the implications of anthropomorphic representations of animals are its less prioritized terrains. Hence, this panel aims to explore the cross-over of these categories within the broader intersectional framework of postcolonialism and environmentalism in the historical contexts of colonialism and globalization in order to gain greater insight into the emerging theory of postcolonial ecocriticism or environmental theory and this theory’s use as an analytic so as to examine global Anglophone or postcolonial novels from different regions of the world.  

Please send us an abstract or a proposal of 350-450 words (in a word doc format) for your proposed paper to be presented at the 2023 NeMLA conference by September 30, 2022 via the NeMLA website: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP