Postcolonial Ecocriticism and Victorian Studies

Since the turn of the twenty-first century a growing amount of scholarship has focused on the correlations between postcolonial studies and environmental criticism or ecocriticism. Despite the numerous ethical and political connections of global social justice and ecological crisis, postcolonial and ecocritical approaches have historically remained distant from one another. The emergence of postcolonial ecocriticism, however, has aimed to move beyond the mutual unease that has characterized the relationship of these two critical perspectives, formulating a more ecologically aware postcolonialism and a more politically conscious ecocriticism. While the majority of postcolonialecocritical scholarship so far has concentrated on contemporary literature, postcolonial ecocriticism has particular relevance for Victorian Studies. As an era of intensive imperial expansion and industrial development, the nineteenth century comprised a pivotal stage in global environmental history that brought dramatic ecological change to many regions of the world in the same moment that it forged momentous political shifts. After introducing the theoretical premises of postcolonial ecocriticism and situating these within the environmental history of empire, this essay sketches some areas of possibility of this new critical approach for unpacking the global environmental resonances of Victorian literature, concluding with four suggested areas within which a Victorian postcolonial ecocriticism might unfold.