Graham Huggan

celebrity conservationists in the television age

Nature's saviours

Lars Jensen

This book approaches the Arctic from a postcolonial perspective, taking into account both its historical status as a colonised region and new, economically driven forms of colonialism. One catchphrase currently being used to describe these new colonialisms is 'the scramble for the Arctic'. This cross-disciplinary study, featuring contributions from an international team of experts in the field, offers a set of broadly postcolonial perspectives on the European Arctic, which is taken here as ranging from Greenland and Iceland in the North Atlantic to the upper regions of Norway and Sweden in the European High North. While the contributors acknowledge the renewed scramble for resources that characterises the region, it also argues the need to 'unscramble' the Arctic, wresting it away from its persistent status as a fixed object of western control and knowledge. Instead, the book encourages a reassertion of micro-histories of Arctic space and territory that complicate western grand narratives of technological progress, politico-economic development, and ecological 'state change'. It will be of interest to scholars of Arctic Studies across all disciplines.

Unscrambling the Arctic

Postcolonial Perspectives on the European High North

Helen Tiffin

In Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examine relationships between humans, animals and the environment in postcolonial texts. Divided into two sections that consider the postcolonial first from an environmental and then a zoocritical perspective, the book looks at: narratives of development in postcolonial writing entitlement and belonging in the pastoral genre colonialist 'asset stripping' and the Christian mission the politics of eating and representations of cannibalism animality and spirituality sentimentality and anthropomorphism the place of the human and the animal in a 'posthuman' world. Making use of the work of authors as diverse as J.M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Jamaica Kincaid and V.S. Naipaul, the authors argue that human liberation will never be fully achieved without challenging how human societies have constructed themselves in hierarchical relation to other human and nonhuman communities, and without imagining new ways in which these ecologically connected groupings can be creatively transformed.

Literature, Animals, Environment

Postcolonial Ecocriticism

This concise introductory study showcases Carey's storytelling talents. Carey's success, in Australia and elsewhere, owes much to his ability to lure his readers into a world at once familiar and fantastic. Carey's fictions are products of the dream factories of twentieth century corporate capitalism. He debunks the utopian myths of western consumer culture, revealing beneath New Age cant the brutal worship of wealth and power. The world of which they speak is less exotic than grotesque but it is not, for all that, irredeemable. Huggan argues that Carey's fictions present both a satire on destructive material values and a defence of the right to change, to invent new pasts and futures.

Peter Carey

Ian Law

This multidisciplinary edited collection turns the postcolonial critical gaze back on Europe itself, arguing that racism is alive and dangerously well and examining a variety of postcolonial criticism in order to understand a variety of racisms: those of false respect, reaction, and surveillance. Racism Postcolonialism Europe wisely suggests that all of these forms of postcolonial racism occur under the guise of representing the interests of the European people— which is a very different entity than the European population as a whole. This volume—which includes contributions from Griselda Pollock, Michel Wieviorka, and Philomena Essed—will be required reading for scholars and students of race, postcolonial studies, sociology, and cultural studies alike.

Racism Postcolonialism Europe

This second edition of Postcolonial Ecocriticism, a book foundational for its field, has been updated to consider recent developments in the area such as environmental humanities and animal studies. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examine transverse relations between humans, animals and the environment across a wide range of postcolonial literary texts and also address key issues such as global warming, food security, human over-population in the context of animal extinction, queer ecology, and the connections between postcolonial and disability theory. Considering the postcolonial first from an environmental and then a zoocritical perspective, the book looks at: Narratives of development in postcolonial writing Entitlement, belonging and the pastoral Colonial 'asset stripping' and the Christian mission The politics of eating and the representation of cannibalism Animality and spirituality Sentimentality and anthropomorphism The changing place of humans and animals in a 'posthuman' world. With a new preface written specifically for this edition and an annotated list of suggestions for further reading, Postcolonial Ecocriticism offers a comprehensive and fully up-to-date introduction to a rapidly expanding field.

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. In a provocative contribution to the series, Graham Huggan presents fresh readings of an outstanding, sometimes deeply unsettling national literature whose writers and readers just as unmistakably belong to the wider world. Australian literature is not the unique province of Australian readers and critics; nor is its exclusive task to provide an internal commentary on changing national concerns. Huggan's book adopts a transnational approach, motivated by postcolonial interests, in which contemporary ideas taken from postcolonial criticism and critical race theory are productively combined and imaginatively transformed. Rejecting the fashionable view that Australia is not, and never will be, postcolonial, Huggan argues on the contrary that Australian literature, like other settler literatures, requires close attention to postcolonial methods and concerns. A postcolonial approach to Australian literature, he suggests, is more than just a case for a more inclusive nationalism; it also involves a general acknowledgement of the nation's changed relationship to an increasingly globalized world. As such, the book helps to deprovincialize Australian literary studies. Australian Literature also contributes to debates about the continuing history of racism in Australia-a history in which the nation's literature has played a constitutive role, as both product and producer of racial tensions and anxieties, nowhere more visible than in the discourse it has produced about race, both within and beyond the national context.

Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism

Australian Literature

Patrick Holland

Looks at how contemporary travel writing reflects gender, cultural history, and social class

Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing

Tourists with Typewriters

David Higgins

Will Abberley

Christina Alt

Pippa Marland

Why do we speak so much of nature today when there is so little of it left? Prompted by this question, this study offers the first full-length exploration of modern British nature writing, from the late eighteenth century to the present. Focusing on non-fictional prose writing, the book supplies new readings of classic texts by Romantic, Victorian and Contemporary authors, situating these within the context of an enduringly popular genre. Nature writing is still widely considered fundamentally celebratory or escapist, yet it is also very much in tune with the conflicts of a natural world under threat. The book's four authors connect these conflicts to the triple historical crisis of the environment; of representation; and of modern dissociated sensibility. This book offers an informed critical approach to modern British nature writing for specialist readers, as well as a valuable guide for general readers concerned by an increasingly diminished natural world.

Modern British Nature Writing, 1789–2020

A provocative look at travel—both voluntary and otherwise—in an uncertain world

Travel/Writing in an Age of Globalization

Extreme Pursuits

Travel writing, it has been said, helped produce the rest of the world for a Western audience. Could the same be said more recently of postcolonial writing? In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is attributed to postcolonial works within their cultural field. Using varied methods of analysis, Huggan discusses both the exoticist discourses that run through postcolonial studies, and the means by which postcolonial products are marketed and domesticated for Western consumption. Global in scope, the book takes in everything from: * the latest 'Indo-chic' to the history of the Heinemann African Writers series * from the celebrity stakes of the Booker Prize to those of the US academic star-system *from Canadian multicultural anthologies to Australian 'tourist novels'. This timely and challenging volume points to the urgent need for a more carefully grounded understanding of the processes of production, dissemination and consumption that have surrounded the rapid development of the postcolonial field.

Marketing the Margins

The Postcolonial Exotic

Where now for postcolonial studies? That is the central question in this new volume from one of the field’s most original thinkers. Not so long ago, the driving force behind postcolonial criticism was literary; increasingly, however, many have claimed that the future of postcolonial studies is interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinary Measures thoroughly considers this alternative trajectory through the field of postcolonial studies by setting up a series of conversations among these newly postcolonial disciplines—notably geography, environmental studies, history, and anthropology—and literary studies in which the imaginative possibilities of non-Western epistemologies are brought to the fore.

Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies

Interdisciplinary Measures

Graham Huggan presents a revisionist account of the history of Australian literature, in which contemporary ideas taken from postcolonial criticism and critical race theory are used to inform fresh readings of this outstanding and sometimes deeply unsettling national literature whose writers and readers belong just as unmistakably to the wider world.

Today's celebrity conservationists, many of whom made their reputations through television and other visual media, play a major role in drawing public attention to an increasingly threatened world. This book, one of the first to address this contribution, focuses on five key figures: the English naturalist David Attenborough, the French marine adventurer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the American primatologist Dian Fossey, the Canadian scientist-broadcaster-activist David Suzuki, and the Australian 'crocodile hunter' Steve Irwin. Some of the issues the author addresses include: What is the changing relationship between western conservation and celebrity? How has the spread of television helped shape and mediate this relationship? To what extent can celebrity conservation be seen as part of a global system in which conservation, like celebrity, is big business? The book critically examines the heroic status accorded to the five figures mentioned above, taking in the various discourses – around nature, science, nation, gender – through which they and their work have been presented to us. In doing so, it fills in the cultural, historical and ideological background behind contemporary celebrity conservationism as a popular expression of a chronically endangered world.

Celebrity Conservationists in the Television Age

Nature's Saviours

Racism Postcolonialism Europe turns the postcolonial critical gaze that had previously been most likely to train itself on regions other than Europe, and sometimes those perceived to be most culturally or geographically distant from Europe, back on Europe itself. The book argues that racism is alive and dangerously well in Europe, and examines this racism through the lens of postcolonial criticism. Postcolonial racism can be a racism of reaction, based on the perceived threat to traditional social and cultural identities; or a racism of (false) respect, based on mainstream liberals’ desire to hold at arm’s length ‘different’ cultures they are anxious not to offend. Most of all, postcolonial racism, at least within the contemporary European context, is a racism of surveillance, whereby ‘foreigners’ become ‘aliens’, ‘protection’ disguises ‘preference’, and ‘cultural difference’ slides into ‘racial stigmatization’ ––all in the interests of representing the European people, which is a very different entity to the European population as a whole. Boasting a broad multidisciplinary approach and a range of distinguished contributors - including Philomena Essed, Michel Wieviorka and Griselda Pollock – Racism Postcolonialism Europe will be required reading for scholars and students of race, postcolonial studies, sociology, European history and literary and cultural studies.

Stephen Watson

Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee is one of the first collections of critical essays on this major contemporary writer. The essays, written by an international cast of contributors, adopt a variety of approaches to Coetzee's often controversial work, taking care to place that work within its wider cultural context. Contributions include essays of more general import, ranging across Coetzee's oeuvre, as well as essays that analyse in more detail individual Coetzee novels. The collection also includes a preface by Coetzee's fellow South African, the internationally acclaimed writer Nadine Gordimer.

Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee

The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies is a major reference work, which aims to provide informed insights into the possible future of postcolonial studies as well as a comparative overview of the latest developments in the field.

Graham Huggan

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