English

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.

Investigating transcultural encounters between Europe and Australia in Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus (1998) through an ecocritical lens, this essay re-evaluates the act of naming trees with regard to the status of the character symbolically called Holland. Critics have underlined how, in colonial contexts, the naturalist taxonomy of the environment partakes of the settlers’ conquest of new colonies: Jamaica Kincaid’s assertion ‘to name is to possess’ crystallises this cultural process of ecological imperialism. While I acknowledge this phenomenon, a re-appraisal of the naming practice in Eucalyptus allows us to transcend the legacy of polarised colonial and anthropocentric perspectives. Holland’s status may be interpreted positively in view of Neil Evernden’s concept of ‘individual-inenvironment’: if so, the act of naming represents humankind’s constructive attempt at establishing a sense of place within a new territory. Bail’s protagonists exemplify different stages in this process of interrelatedness between the human and non-human realms, one that resists a conventional subject-object relationship. Whereas the ambivalent Holland embodies a factual and existential naturalism, the imaginative approach to the treescape of his daughter Ellen and her storytelling suitor fully emancipates them from the commodifying effect of Holland’s naming competition. Bail’s aesthetics reflects the dissolving boundary between the self and environment: deployed in the suitor’s fable-like stories and Bail’s rich prose, the ecopoetic devices of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism defy the rational laws of Western realism. This ecopoetics of interrelatedness restores the agency of the eucalypts while negating the concept of a traditionally dominant human presence in the environment. In Eucalyptus, taxonomy reveals the reciprocal dynamics of a genuine interpenetration: Holland’s ‘bush garden’ becomes a global space that combines European (symbolised by Holland and the stories) and Australian (the eucalypts) identities. Thus, Bail projects a creative site of transcultural dialogue at the level of the terrain through the complementary processes of physical and subjective interrelatedness.

Book review of Kim Anderson Sasser. Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism: Strategizing Belonging. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. Pp. 260. ISBN: 9781137301895.
Published in the journal of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA): Recherche littéraire / Literary Research 33 (Été 2017 / Summer 2017): 118-23.

Book review of Hubert Zapf. Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 301 pp. ISBN: 9781474274654.
Review published in the bilingual journal of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA): Recherche littéraire / Literary Research 34 (Été 2018 / Summer 2018): 236-42.

Book review of Ben Holgate. Climate and Crises: Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 234 pp.
Published in Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 11.1 (2020): 204-206. https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2020.11.1.3265

Call for Papers for the 2021 annual conference of the Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education (BAAHE). This year’s theme is “Voicing Absences/Presences in a Damaged World” and spans a wide array of topics across the disciplines of literary & cultural studies, linguistics, and translation studies.

Confirmed keynote speakers are Professors Kate Rigby (Bath Spa University) and Alexa Weik von Mossner (University of Klagenfurt). 

Please send your abstracts (300 words) to [email protected] and [email protected] by 1st September 2021 (extended deadline).

This one-day conference will take place on 3rd December 2021, at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. Depending on the coronavirus measures in autumn, the conference will either be organised in person or online.