ABSTRACT
Critical contexts In recent years, several prominent scholars have complained that ecocritics too often focus their research primarily on American texts and contexts. “At American ecocritical conferences and in recent publications,” Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley observe, “we see an increasing tendency to naturalize a dominant American origin for ecological thought” (14). As a result, Rob Nixon notes, “a prodigious amount of American environmental writing and criticism . . . remains amnesiac toward non-American geographies in which America is implicated” (239). According to these scholars, the best remedy for such parochialism lies in a marriage between ecocriticism and postcolonial theory, the latter of which can help the former to reconfigure environmental history “in broader, more rhizomatic terms” (DeLoughrey and Handley 14-15).
