ABSTRACT
This chapter comes from two motivations: firstly, to investigate the capacity of contemporary world literature to represent revolution, both historical and imagined, as explicit subject and content; and secondly, to explore the ecology of revolution. It begins by imagining a world-literary criticism that seeks to take account of the revolutionary political potential of literature to challenge our global present. Humans are powerful environment-making species, but they are also environments that are made and unmade by the activities of extra-human life and biospheric processes: from epidemics to climates, to bacterial microbiomes, to meteorological and geological forces. Guadeloupean theorist Daniel Maximin makes a point about the environmental history of resistance to slavery and colonialism in plantation isles, arguing that cataclysmic events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanos helped to engender in the oppressed a ‘dream of revolt’ through the ways in which ‘the revolts of nature’ destroy the physical structures of plantation and colonialism, from homes, to boats, to cities and ports.
