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Title POSTCOLONIAL ECOCRITICISM: AN ANALYTICAL STUDY OF GHOSH AND SILKO’S FICTION

Author(s) Qura-tul-Ain_Mughal

Abstract ABSTRACT This dissertation endeavors to explore and capture the colonial tactics to occupy natives and their lands and its effects on native environments via Indian and Native American postcolonial literature. It revolves around the boundaries of colonial influence on places, humans and animals. To view colonial tactics of occupation in the selected texts the concepts of new materialism have been added to the theory of postcolonial ecocriticism. By incorporating newmaterialism, colonial occupation can be seen ‘as a machine’ which produces commodities for economic benefits. This ‘machine’ produces dynamic processes which are an integral part of diverse anti environmental strategies of the colonizers created to achieve certain goals. Every process can be seen as a whole which is composed of systematic underlying process of creating and maintaining the empire. This research, however views only three dynamic processes of occupation e.g. Myth of Development, Environmental Racism and Biocolonization. By delimiting the research to two significant writers of different geopolitical regions (Leslie Marmon Silko Native American and Amitav Ghosh Indian), the research demonstrates that postcolonial environmental destruction is a commonplace feature in the work of both writers. Ghosh’s texts draw attention to development as a continuing process of occupation and recognize political relationalities of sustainable development and state vampirism and its effect on Indian environments. Silko’s texts encompass Biocolonization and Environmental Racism as the systematic practices and policies that Euro-Americans draw on to extend and maintain their control over the Native Americans and their lands.Moreover the selected texts also gesture beyond historical discourse to a global context by particularizing issues that affect the planet as a whole. The research also explores how the colonial tactics of occupation are constructed through the systematic processes of knowing and materializing the colonial subjects. For theoretical framework, this research is reliant on Graham Huggan and Hellen Tiffins’ Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (2010). Textual analysis has been used as a method for the analysis of the selected texts but it is further delimited to Catherine Belsey’s concept of historical background and intertextuality.

Type Thesis/Dissertation

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2019-10-18

Subject English Literature

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