ABSTRACT
Ecocriticism exemplifies the diffusion of comparatist assumptions and perspectives into other fields of literary study that Haun Saussy portrayed as characteristic of comparative literature in 2004. Ecocriticism and the environmental humanities form part of an array of new interdisciplinary areas that have emerged across the humanities and qualitative social sciences over the last two decades. For comparative ecocritics, the emergence of the environmental humanities has opened up an enormously rich and varied field of exchanges with anthropologists, geographers, and historians. Social and economic stratifications as well as cultural conventions work to produce the relationships differently in different places–but the more-than-human world produces human differences in a variety of ways, as new work in the environmental humanities is beginning to show. Postcolonial ecocritics, drew new attention to the convergences between colonial oppression and ecological degradation, to the unequal distribution of resources and risks, and in some cases, to First-World environmentalists’ complicity in perpetuating conditions of socioeconomic injustice.
