Teaser from my seminar paper for Environmental Lit (20 page critical literature research paper), aka the bane of my existence for the last three months. Due tomorrow and never looking back... (Seriously, it's pretty boring and pretentious-sounding, but I have to do something with it!)
Word as Weapon: Dismantling Hierarchy Through Boundary-Crossing in Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge and Arundhati Roy’s The Cost of Living
"The establishment has always feared writers, because writers have the power of clarity, and when they choose to use it, it can be deadly."
–Arundhati Roy, DAM/AGE, a film with Arundhati Roy
Contemporary writers across the globe such as Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass, Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy combine environmental and social activism with literature, employing creative literary devices to reach a wider political audience. The willingness of such authors to blur the lines between nonfiction reporting and creative literature is indicative of a holistic approach to solving the world’s social and environmental ills that is also reflected in modern political movements. In an article on the relationship between postcolonial and ecocritical literature, Graham Huggan recognizes that the similarities between these literary movements are rooted in a shared holistic view of social problems. Criticizing a primarily European American approach to ecocriticism, Huggan suggests that postcolonial literature is characterized by an insistence on the inseparability of current crises of ecological mismanagement from historical legacies of imperialistic exploitation and authoritarian abuse (702). However, western ecocritical female writers are exploring similar links between environmental and human degradation by aligning specific human and ecological communities, often going so far as to link the landscape to the physical human body. Terry Tempest Williams, an ecofeminist author from a developed nation, and Arundhati Roy, an ecocritical writer from a developing nation, both seek to challenge the traditional power structures of their various environments by analyzing the deep connection between their “othered” groups and the specific ecological locations they inhabit. In doing so, these two writers demonstrate the similar techniques and approaches of ecofeminist and postcolonial literary activists, despite their different geographic locations and personal backgrounds.
On the surface, a Mormon naturalist from a wealthy family of developers in Salt Lake City, Utah may not seem to have much in common with a former student of architecture and novelist from New Delhi. But the differences in the backgrounds of Terry Tempest Williams and Arundhati Roy lead them both to a life of activism, devoted to the communities—both human and ecological—from which they came. Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge is a book devoted to two such communities: her immediate family, a Mormon stronghold shaken to the core by the deaths of its women, in this case, Williams’ mother, by cancer; and the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, which, during the same season, suffered a devastating loss of habitat due to the flooding of the Great Salt Lake. Arundhati Roy’s collection of two essays, The Cost of Living, explores the relationship of Indians to their modern environment: in “The Greater Common Good”, addressing the close ties between the Adivasi and the Narmada River; in “The End of Imagination”, analyzing the potential physical and psychological impacts of Indian nuclear proliferation on the country’s people as a whole.
In both works of literature, the authors share a common goal: to bring together the fates of a people and their ecological community in a way that challenges their domination by questioning the traditional structure of power. To this end, Williams and Roy employ similar literary techniques, namely: aligning the identity of a specific group of people to a specific place and linking the physical human body (often female) with the natural landscape, in order to place their texts in a larger political context by refusing to adhere to preconceived boundaries on which the exploitation of resources is based.
If you got this far, bravo. Tell me what you think!
coming soon to a conference near you?
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