The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representing what Eduoard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth." The essays are organized around a group of thematic concerns that engage culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, the lives of animals, and the relationship between the military and the tourist industry. With chapters that address works by J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Zakes Mda, and many others, Postcolonial Ecologies makes a remarkable contribution to rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing global environmental issues.

Introduction: Towards an Aesthetics of the EarthElizabeth DeLoughrey & George HandleyI.Cultivating PlaceChapter 1 Cultivating Community:Counterlandscaping in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of LossJill DidurChapter 2 Haiti's Elusive ParadiseLeGrace BensonChapter 3 Towards a Caribbean Ecopoetics: Derek Walcott's Language of PlantsElaine SavoryII. Forest FictionsChapter 4 Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean LiteraturesLizabeth Paravisini GebertChapter 5 The Postcolonial Ecology of the New World Baroque:Alejo Carpentier's The Lost StepsGeorge B. HandleyChapter 6 Forest Fictions and Ecological Crises:Reading the Politics of Survival in Mahasweta Devi's "Dhowli"Jennifer WenzelIII. The Lives of (Nonhuman) AnimalsChapter 7. Stranger in the Eco-Village: Environmental Time, Race, and Ecologies of LookingRob NixonChapter 8. What the Whales Would Tell Us: Cetacean Communication in Novels by Witi Ihimaera,Linda Hogan, Zakes Mda, and Amitav GhoshJonathan SteinwandChapter 9. Compassion, Commodification, and The Lives of Animals: J.M. Coetzee's Recent FictionAllison CarruthChapter 10. "Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us:" Toxic Postcoloniality in Animal's PeoplePablo MukherjeeIV. MilitourismChapter 11. Heliotropes: Solar Ecologies and Pacific RadiationsElizabeth DeLoughreyChapter 12. Activating Voice, Body, and Place:Kanaka Maoli and Ma'ohi Writings for Kaho'olawe and MoruroaDina El DessoukyChapter 13. "Out of this great tragedy will come a world class tourism destination:"Disaster, Ecology, and Post-Tsunami Tourism Development in Sri LankaAnthony CarriganChapter 14. In Place: Tourism, Cosmopolitan Bioregionalism, and Zakes Mda's The Heart of RednessByron Caminero-Santangelo