Empire, Narrative and the Global Environment

Elizabeth DeLoughrey
English
UC Los Angeles

This conference brought together major scholars in the emergent field of postcolonial ecocriticism to address the role of empire in understanding representations of the environment and foreground the importance of humanities-based approaches to environmental knowledge and representation. Working in diverse fields of study and regions such as African, Caribbean, Latin American, South Asian, and Pacific Island Studies, participants examined narrative production of these regions to produce a published work focused on the importance of global and humanities-based approaches to environmental thought. Participants organized into five thematic streams to focus on the pedagogical and research implications of narrative representations of global climate change; energy and petrocultures; (eco)tourism, gardening, and food sovereignty; environmentalism of the poor; and neo-liberalism and disaster capitalism. The specific outcomes of this meeting included the planning of a two-volume special issue of the online, open access journal, Postcolonial Text.