E-Book Overview
Western exploitation of other peoples is inseparable from attitudes and practices relating to other species and the extra-human environment generally. Colonial depredations turn on such terms as 'human', 'savage', 'civilised', 'natural', 'progressive', and on the legitimacies governing apprehension and control of space and landscape. Environmental impacts were reinforced, in patterns of unequal 'exchange', by the transport of animals, plants and peoples throughout the European empires, instigating widespread ecosystem change under unequal power regimes (a harbinger of today's 'globalization'). This book considers these imperial 'exchanges' and charts some contemporary legacies of those inequitable imports and exports, transportations and transmutations. Sheep farming in Australia, transforming the land as it dispossessed the native inhabitants, became a symbol of (new, white) nationhood. The transportation of plants (and animals) into and across the Pacific, even where benign or nostalgic, had widespread environmental effects, despite the hopes of the acclimatisation societies involved, and, by extension, of missionary societies "planting the seeds of Christianity." In the Caribbean, plantation slavery pushed back the "jungle" (itself an imported word) and erased the indigenous occupants one example of the righteous, biblically justified cultivation of the wilderness. In Australia, artistic depictions of landscape, often driven by romantic and 'gothic' aesthetics, encoded contradictory settler mindsets, and literary representations of colonial Kenya mask the erasure of ecosystems. Chapters on the early twentieth century (in Canada, Kenya, and Queensland) indicate increased awareness of the value of species-preservation, conservation, and disease control. The tension between traditional and 'Euroscientific' attitudes towards conservation is revealed in attitudes towards control of the Ganges, while the urge to resource exploitation has produced critical disequilibrium in Papua New Guinea. Broader concerns centering on ecotourism and ecocriticism are treated in further essays summarising how the dominant West has alienated 'nature' from human beings through commodification in the service of capitalist 'progress'.
E-Book Content
Five Emus to the King of Siam Environment and Empire
C
ross ultures
Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English
92 Series Editors
Gordon Collier (Giessen)
Hena Maes–Jelinek (Liège)
Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)
Five Emus to the King of Siam Environment and Empire
Edited by
Helen Tiffin
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Cover design: Gordon Collier and Pier Post Photo’s by Helen Tiffin The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2243-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands
Table of Contents ] —————————— Acknowledgements Illustrations
vii ix
HELEN TIFFIN
Introduction LEIGH DALE Empire’s Proxy: Sheep and the Colonial Environment
xi
1
CLAUDIA BRANDENSTEIN Representations of Landscape and Nature in Anthony Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main and James Anthony Froude’s The English in the West Indies
15
MEENAKSHI SHARMA Polluted River or Goddess and Saviour? The Ganga in the Discourses of Modernity and Hinduism
31
HELEN GILBERT Ecotourism: A Colonial Legacy?
51
ANDREW MCCANN Colonial Nature-Inscription: On Haunted Landscapes
71
RUTH BLAIR “Transported Landscapes”: Reflections on Empire and Environment in the Pacific
85
CARRIE DAWSON The “I” in Beaver: Sympathetic Identi