RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 "Man-as-environment" : spatialising racial and natural otherness in Caryl Phillips's "A distant shore" and "In the falling snow"
A1 Maufort, Jessica
K1 Urban ecocriticism
K1 Spatialisation of race/Otherness
K1 Social/environmental justice
K1 Postcolonial antipastoral
K1 "Man-as-environment"
K1 Ecocrítica urbana
K1 Espacialización racial/de la alteridad
K1 Justicia social/medioambiental
K1 Antipastoril postcolonial
K1 Literatura
K1 Literature
K1 Medio ambiente
K1 Environmental science
AB Examining Caryl Phillips’s later fiction (A Distant Shore and In the Falling Snow) through the characters’ lived experience of their environment, this article seeks to pave the way toward a mutually enriching dialogue between postcolonial studies and urban ecocriticism. Phillips’s British novels show how Western racist/colonial underpinnings that persist in a postcolonial context are manifest in the phenomenon of spatialisation of race. The latter devises separate spaces of Otherness, imbued with savage connotations, where the undesirable Other is ostracised. The enriching concept of “man-in-environment” is thus reconfigured so that the postcolonial subject’s identity is defined by such bias-constructed dwelling-places. Consequently, the Other’s sense of place is a highly alienated one. The decayed suburban nature and the frightening/impersonal city of London are also “othered” entities with which the protagonists cannot interrelate. My “man-as-environment” concept envisions man and place as two subjected Others plagued by spatialisation of Otherness. The latter actually debunks the illusion of a postcolonial British Arcadia, as the immigrants’ plight is that of an antipastoral disenchantment with England. The impossibility of being a “man-in-place” in a postcolonial context precisely calls for a truly reconciling postpastoral relationship between humans and place, a relationship thus informed by the absolute need for environmental and social justice combined.
PB Universidad de Alcalá
SN 2171-9594
YR 2014
FD 2014-04
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10017/20232
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10017/20232
LA eng
DS MINDS@UW
RD 24-abr-2024