Colonialism and/as Catastrophe: Animals, Environment, and Ecological Catastrophe in the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel

This dissertation analyzes literary representations of ecological catastrophe in contemporary postcolonial fiction to study the relationship between colonialism and catastrophe and to reveal the critical role animals and the environment play in literary renditions of catastrophe. Its primary site of investigation are six novels that I use as case studies to examine how postcolonial texts render experiences of catastrophe and connect contemporary ecological vulnerability to colonial legacies. I focus on fictional texts that engage with ecological catastrophe and climate change, environmental instability and exploitation, and human-nonhuman relations in an era that some scholars refer to as the Anthropocene a time in which human activity has become a main driver of global environmental change. I limit my analysis to novels from South Asian and the South Pacific, because in addition to sharing a past as British colonies, these regions are consistently identified as at-risk for ecological catastrophes. I show that the formal properties of novels (their commitment to representing mundane and repeated events and their focus on detailed psychological portraits) make them productive sites for thinking through the way ecological vulnerability is experienced unequally across the globe. Highlighting that factors such as race, class, and indigeneity affect how individuals living in ecologically vulnerable regions experience catastrophe, I emphasize the way intersecting positionalities shape the narrative representation of catastrophe. I demonstrate that relationships with local animal species and the land help environmentally vulnerable populations cope with catastrophe, and that postcolonial texts use the nonhuman to work through violent environmental events. In this way, I foreground the potential contributions of literary fiction to transnational efforts to better understand how postcolonial subjects experience ecological catastrophe and massive-scale environmental change, and how they imagine possible recovery.