EVERYDAY ENVIRONMENTALISMS IN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

This dissertation draws on a broad range of postcolonial literature in order to explore literary representations of environmentalism in the global South. Although this project draws heavily on the particular environmental histories of different nations and geographic regions, I am also interested in areas of overlap. In this study I do two interrelated and simultaneous things that I hope will refine postcolonial ecocriticism. The first involves a broadening of the definition of “environment, ” informed by the environmental justice movement, in ways that make it more applicable to people's lived lives. This expanded definition of the environment includes those spaces where people live and work. Such a redefinition, I argue, is a crucial counter-measure to ecocriticism's Anglo-American focus, where traditional American environmental values of conservation, preservation and the cult of the wilderness prevail. The second intervention involves using ecocriticism alongside this expanded notion of the environment to unearth the everyday environmentalisms at work in postcolonial literature that may go unnoticed using traditional ecocritical approaches. I argue that this everyday approach successfully side-steps some of the common hurdles in postcolonial ecocriticism. These hurdles include debates over th