Growing concern with the environment has, in the last few decades, resulted in the expansion and diversification of the field of environmental criticism and the increase in publications that explore the relevance of literature in rethinking the questions of ecology, environmental ethics, and spatiality more generally. Looking back, we see that in the 1990s Arif Dirlik had already concluded that we are increasingly witnessing “the irruption of place consciousness into social and political analysis.” This growing place consciousness “is closely linked, and appears as the radical other of that other conspicuous phenomenon of the last decade, globalism.”Footnote ¹ In an irremediably globalized world, our “here” and “now” seem to reflect not only the epochal clash between the manageable concreteness of the local and the inconceivable ubiquity of the global, but also the more complex historical trajectory of global capitalism, its connection to colonialism, and its impact on space. How we understand political identity, social life, and our ecological future thus depends to a large extent on the ways we read, and write, the environment.

Taking colonial history with its exploitation and production of environment as its point of departure, one relatively recent trend within environmental criticism consists of tracing the links between postcolonial studies and environmental criticism. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley’s edited volume Postcolonial Ecologies: Literature of the Environment (2011) and Beth Fowkes Tobin’s Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–1820 (2005) address—each in its own original and contextually specific way—the issues of the natural environment and the colonial production of spatiality as crucial to our understanding of the historical evolution of contemporary place consciousness. Literature, and particularly colonial and postcolonial literature, is seen as not merely passively reflecting but as actively producing spatial knowledge and the political and social practices that arise from it.

Following Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s remarkable study Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (2010), as well as their own (with Renée Gosson) groundbreaking Caribbean Literature and The Environment: Between Nature and Culture (2005), DeLoughrey and Handley take up the broader question of the “greening of the humanities” by investigating, in this edited collection, the role of literature in mediating environmental knowledge and the poetics of place in the context of alienating globalization. In their introduction, the authors point out, however, that the “ecocritical turn” in literary studies has been marked by a perceptible increase in Anglo-American national frameworks. This edited volume is therefore a worthy and timely attempt to enrich the narrowly circumscribed ecocritical narrative by engaging with postcolonial methodologies. “By insisting on the vitality and even necessity of a postcolonial ecocritical frame, our collection,” write DeLoughrey and Handley, “foregrounds literature’s engagement with the globalization of the environment, a process that has been formulated by a long and complex history of empire” (10). The collection thus draws into focus the inextricability of colonial and environmental histories. At the same time, the authors insist on the centrality of the literary imagination not only in the processes of decolonization but also in the practices of building or reclaiming a sense of place. The essays in this volume are organized thematically around questions of culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, animals, and the interplay between the military and tourist industries (termed militourism). The contributors explore diverse geographical and literary contexts, from Africa and the Caribbean to the Pacific Islands and South Asia, seeking to emphasize the links between spatial imagination, literary practice, colonial history, and globalization and the possibilities for rethinking what Edouard Glissant—to whom this collection is dedicated—called the “aesthetics of the earth.”

Beth Fowkes Tobin’s Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–1820 explores the environmental history of British colonization of the tropics and the impact of that colonial spatial practice on British self-understanding. Insisting that agriculture remains largely untheorized in the study of colonial expansion, Tobin sets out to show how the monoculture of sugar in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the cotton, tea, and indigo estates in India transformed not only the regions and populations that they involved but also profoundly changed the social fabric of Britain itself. Like DeLoughrey and Handley’s collection, Tobin’s study highlights the overarching impact of colonialism both on the “periphery” that produced these much coveted agricultural commodities and on the “metropole” that sought out and consumed them. In tracing the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial agriculture, Tobin’s central concern is to draw attention to the discursive practices that erased labor and history from the representation of tropical nature, most often seen as fertility and abundance. Tropicality thus becomes a crucial term for understanding the ways in which European and particularly British poets, painters, botanists, and natural historians imagined and depicted the colonies while erasing the conditions under which tropical commodities were produced. Intellectual and visual mastery of the tropics thus went hand in hand with the material appropriation of labor and natural resources. Tobin interrogates how the artistic and discursive practices of British poets, artists, intellectuals, and explorers in the Caribbean, the South Pacific, and India ultimately shaped British imperial identity, showing “how these modes of representation constructed the tropics as simultaneously paradisiacal and in need of British intervention and management” (2). Tobin’s study offers a fascinating insight into the aestheticizing strategies of georgic verse, garden conversation pieces, landscape portraiture, and cataloguing practices in natural history and botanical writing as a means of decontextualizing, fixing, and recasting the meaning of tropical landscape while concealing its role in materially and symbolically producing the empire.