An essay on the ‘Future of Postcolonial Studies and Environmental Studies'.

 Assignment-3

An essay on the ‘Future of Postcolonial Studies and Environmental Studies. 

Name:   Avani Jani

paper: 203 The Postcolonial studies

Roll no: 03

Enrollment no: 4069206420220014

Email id: avanijani.18@gmail.com

Batch: 2023-2024 (M.A Sem 3) 

Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English, maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Introduction-

Colonialism, characterized as a system of dominance, spans a 400-year era of European exploration, conquest, settlement, and the exploitation of extensive land areas. Environmental colonialism signifies the diverse ways in which colonial practices have affected the natural environments of Indigenous peoples. Historian Alfred Crosby contends that the success of colonists can be attributed, at least in part, to their capacity to modify native ecosystems. By introducing native societies to foreign markets and exotic invasive species, colonists constrained the ability of Indigenous peoples to protect themselves from both economic and biological intrusions. Recovery from the damage done to native ecosystems proved difficult for native populations. Colonial powers exacerbated the problem by creating a global infrastructure that encouraged wealthier countries to extract natural resources from poorer peripheral countries, while simultaneously destabilizing what were often sustainable native cultures (Stoll).

Scholars in environmental studies occasionally interchange the terms "environmental colonialism," "neocolonialism," and "ecological imperialism." It is important to note, as emphasized by Edward Said, that "imperialism" encompasses the practices, theories, and attitudes of a dominant metropolitan center governing a distant territory (9. In contrast, "colonization" specifically denotes the outcomes of such dominance on the affected territories. Eco-imperialism is a term coined by Paul Driessen to refer specifically to the forceful imposition of Western environmentalist views on developing countries. Environmental colonialism is one lens that may be applied to the world systems theory analysis of colonization (Stoll). 

Impacts of Environmental Colonialism

The impacts of environmental colonialism manifest in both obvious and unexpected ways, affecting Indigenous peoples and their lands in both immediate and prolonged contexts. The arrival of Europeans in the Americas in 1492, for instance, marked the onset of disease epidemics that resulted in the significant decline of the Indigenous population over the ensuing century, from 1500 to 1600. A recent study out of University College London (UCL) estimates that around 1 percent of the total land mass in the Americas was abandoned during the spread of waves of pandemic disease, or approximately 56 million hectares of land from 55 million post-epidemic human deaths among indigenous communities in the century following Columbus’s arrival (Koch, et al.)

Large-scale depopulation resulted in extensive agricultural land being left fallow, as revealed by UCL researchers. This abandonment allowed the land to undergo natural reclamation, with trees and other vegetation thriving and absorbing enough atmospheric carbon dioxide to contribute to a cooling effect on the planet. The study indicates a recorded drop in the average temperature by 0.15°C during the late 1500s and early 1600s (Milman).

The prosperity of European colonies is often observed in temperate zones resembling European microclimates, as coined by Crosby as "Neo-Europes." These environmental parallels facilitated European colonists in cultivating crops and livestock, leading to a reduction in native habitat diversity (Stoll). Currently, many of these "Neo-Europes," including the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Uruguay, stand as major exporters of grains and animal products that were originally foreign to their landscapes before colonization. However, in "Late Victorian Holocausts" (2000), Mike Davis explores how colonialism and the introduction of capitalism, particularly during the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, resulted in devastating famines in the late 19th century across regions such as India, China, Brazil, Ethiopia, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, and New Caledonia. Davis illustrates how colonialism and capitalism exacerbated rural poverty, contributing to widespread hunger.

While environmental damage caused by colonialism may not always be intentional, its consequences are unmistakable. In "Slow Violence" (2011), Rob Nixon delves into instances where Western environmentalists inadvertently harmed native ecosystems while attempting to address the original harm caused by colonialism. Robert H. Nelson provides examples of how the establishment of national park systems in African nations has led to the displacement of native populations. Writer Teju Cole criticizes this Western interference as the "White-Savior Industrial Complex," emphasizing that addressing environmental issues in Africa requires a reevaluation of American foreign policy, which often directly influences local elections. The case of Nigeria, a top-five oil supplier to the U.S., exemplifies how international governmental economic institutions and transnational corporations persist in engaging in environmental colonialism.

The Human in Postcolonial Criticism Today-

As Dipesh Chakrabarty remarks, Listen to Bhabha writing of the new subaltern classes of today, “the stateless,” “migrant workers, minorities, asylum seekers, [and] refugees” who “represent emergent, undocumented lifeworlds that break through the formal language of ‘protection’ and ‘status’ because”—he says, quoting Balibar—“they are ‘neither insiders [n]or outsiders, or (for many of us) . . . insiders officially considered outsiders.” 

In a manner reminiscent of Bhabha, one might have anticipated this inversion of the external with the internal and vice versa. However, Bhabha's interpretation does not align with the "cosmopolitan claims of global ethical equivalence" for these emerging subalterns within the global capitalist order. His focus is not solely on the rights discourse but equally on the deprivation inherent in the human condition under these circumstances. He observes, "As insiders/outsiders, they damage the cosmopolitan dream of a ‘world without borders’... by opening up, amid international polity, a complex and contradictory mode of being or surviving somewhere in between legality and incivility. It is a kind of no-man’s land that, in the world of migration, shadows global success... it substitutes cultural survival in migrant milieux for full civic participation."  

Bhabha's focus on "full civic participation" reveals his normative aspirations, recognizing that acknowledging the human condition doesn't automatically dismiss concerns of social justice. While Bhabha acknowledges that the politics of cultural survival often supersedes "full civic participation" for the new subalterns of the global economy, he navigates between these poles to view cultural survival not only as a creative and improvisational zone but also as an area of deprivation and disenfranchisement.

Bhabha's freedom to think contradictorily, contemplating both mobility (survival) and stasis (civic participation) simultaneously, enables him to challenge critics like Hardt and Negri. These critics saw "nomadism and miscegenation" as ethical practices in the terrain of the Empire, emphasizing "circulation" and "deterritorialization" as positive steps toward global citizenship. Bhabha, however, argues that such a fixation on the flowing, borderless global world neglects the fact that migrants, refugees, or nomads do not merely circulate; they need to settle, seek asylum, assert rights, and pursue citizenship.

Bhabha suggests turning attention to less "circulatory" aspects of the economy, like trade, tariffs, taxes, and monetary policy, to understand their impact on the global imaginary of diasporic cultural studies. He emphasizes that positive global relations depend on protecting and enhancing national "territorial" resources, integrating them into the global political economy for resource redistribution and a transnational moral economy of redistributive justice.

 

The quoted passage delves into Bhabha's exploration of the complex interplay between two human figures in his discussions. He contrasts the everyday human, embodying "difference within" as the insider and outsider, with the figure asserting cultural and economic rights, aiming to become a sovereign citizen. Bhabha's writings exhibit a continual shift between normative and onto-existential human images, reflecting the challenges posed by globalized forms of existence.

Bhabha draws on Hannah Arendt to highlight the emergence of statelessness as a consequence of creating a "One World" through nation-states, a condition exacerbated by the political and cultural conditions of modernity. The contemporary issue of statelessness, affecting illegal migrants, guest workers, and asylum seekers, is not solely a result of nation-state arrangements but a deeper predicament stemming from global capital globalization and demographic imbalances in postcolonial development.

Examining examples like Mike Davis's "Planet of Slums" and the experiences of the shack dwellers movement in South Africa, the passage underscores how modern capitalism relies on a substantial pool of often illegal migrant labor, labeled as "surplus population." This reliance denies these groups access to social goods while remaining indispensable to advanced and growing economies.

Refugees and asylum seekers, products of state failures linked to economic, political, demographic, and environmental factors, represent today's subaltern classes, embodying the human condition negatively as a state of deprivation. Ethnographies of their lives cannot portray them positively through the lens of citizenship. Analysts, rooted in civil society, grapple with normative horizons centered on "cultural and economic rights" and "full civic participation," even as the prospect of effective citizenship for all seems increasingly distant. The contemporary reality leaves analysts in a predicament, lacking a vantage point to judge and describe these classes, as ethnographies of the marginalized fail to offer alternative norms in societies still dominated by large institutions, corporations, and bureaucracies, differing from the perspectives found in Marx's classical writings.

Theorists such as Balibar and Mezzadra delve into the historical, political, and policy aspects of refugees, asylum seekers, and illegal immigrants in Europe, noting the presence of over a hundred detention centers. Europe's border protection policies, resembling those of the United States or Australia, create an ambiguity of borders, with detention camps acting as both inside and outside borders. Balibar suggests that while the nineteenth century saw European imperialism turning frontiers into borders by exporting them outside Europe, there's now a shift where borders are becoming frontiers again.

Balibar and Mezzadra's writings reveal a tension between acknowledging historical barbarisms underpinning European civilization and envisioning a utopian European polity that embraces ethical practices and the plurality of human inheritances. European intellectuals increasingly explore postcolonial theory in discussions about refugees and migrants, marking Europe as a new frontier in postcolonial studies. This shift is not due to classical peasant-subaltern subjects but because of the prevalence of new subalterns—refugees, asylum seekers, and illegal workers across Europe. Homi Bhabha, focusing on these groups, develops a conception of the human as inherently dual and contradictory.

Now, let's turn our attention to the issue of global warming and examine how it challenges us to reconsider our understanding of the human...

The Human in the Anthropocene–

The emergence of global warming, catalyzed by the 2007 IPCC report, presents a significant challenge alongside the predominant theme of globalization in shaping our understanding of humanity. While previous critiques, such as rights talk and subject critique, remain relevant, global warming introduces novel dimensions to envisioning the human. Climate change generates its own issues, giving rise to cases of refugees and regime failures, all influenced by existing global inequities. The two outlined visions of the human—universalist global justice and poststructuralist subject critique—will continue to be pertinent.

In addressing climate justice, familiar strategies involve critiquing powerful nations, advocating progressive politics of differentiated responsibilities, and engaging in debates on migration legality. Early works on global warming, like "Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism" by Indian environmental activists, emphasize the intersection of science and politics, underlining the ongoing relevance of established strategies.

Climate science poses a unique challenge to humanists by introducing a problem of scale for the human imagination. The claim that current warming is anthropogenic, with humans collectively influencing the global climate, signifies a departure from past environmental discussions focused on regional impacts. Some scientists, led by Paul J. Crutzen, propose the "Anthropocene" as a new geological era, highlighting human agency in determining the planet's climate. The traditional separation between natural and human histories is challenged, suggesting that humans are now integral to the planet's natural history.

The assignment of geological agency to humans is a recent development in climate science. Scientists, like Roger Revelle and H. E. Suess in 1957, recognized humans as conducting a large-scale geophysical experiment with significant implications for weather and climate processes. This recognition challenges the historical separation between natural and human histories, indicating a shift in understanding the intricate relationship between humans and the planet.

The rhetoric of climate scientists has evolved over time, progressing from viewing humans as experimenters on a geophysical scale in the 1950s to acknowledging them as geophysical forces by the 1990s, particularly in the context of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). This dual conception of the human—both human-human and nonhuman-human—presents challenges for postcolonial scholars.

The first challenge lies in the scale at which human agency is envisioned, with humans collectively capable of affecting the climate for the next hundred thousand years. Scientists, like David Archer, appeal to human experience to bridge the comprehension gap, similar to historians who humanize uninhabited regions by relying on past human experiences and metaphoric language.

However, a significant problem arises in interpreting the human as a geophysical force. Unlike past experiences that historians can access, humans cannot directly experience themselves as this force. This nonhuman, forcelike mode of existence challenges traditional ways of thinking about humans and requires nonontological approaches.

The geophysical force, distinct from subjects or objects, prompts a reevaluation of the culture/nature distinction. Bruno Latour's call for a new politics involving both humans and nonhumans gains complexity with the recognition of humans as geophysical forces.

Addressing climate change becomes a complex, ongoing challenge categorized as a "wicked problem," defying singular rational solutions due to its interconnected nature. Fundamental questions about the ultimate performance metric for humanity, such as optimizing population stability, minimizing ecological footprint, or maximizing happiness, remain unanswered. With a consensus on these issues elusive, the world may increasingly move towards a "risk society" in the era of globalization and global warming, as articulated by Ulrich Beck.

As we grapple with the impacts of climate change amid capitalist growth, our attachments are negotiated through the lens of capitalist inequities, acknowledging their increasing risks. The absence of a unified "humanity" acting as a self-aware agent means that, despite the anthropogenic origins of global warming, there is no corresponding unified political agent. This vacuum allows for struggles around questions of intrahuman justice regarding the uneven impacts of climate change, emphasizing the open space for the politics of climate change.

The politics of climate change is marked by the absence of a single rational solution, necessitating struggles to navigate uncharted territories and work towards what Bruno Latour terms "the progressive composition of a common world." Unlike issues like ozone layer depletion, climate change is fundamentally political, inviting engagement not only from science and technology but also from rhetoric, art, media, and various forms of argumentation and conflict.

In the context of the climate crisis, humans exist in two distinct modes. One mode involves concerns for justice despite recognizing its inherent imperfections, evident in the historiography of "climate justice." Conversely, climate scientists' history reveals a mode where humans, collectively as a geophysical force, become indifferent or neutral to questions of intrahuman justice. This collective mode, beyond biology and lacking ontology, acts as a limit to our ontological existence, necessitating a simultaneous understanding of humans on contradictory registers — as a geophysical force and as a political agent, as rights bearers and authors of actions, subject to both natural forces and individual human experiences. In an era where forces of globalization intersect with global warming, the conception of the human in postcolonial studies needs to be stretched beyond its previous boundaries.

Conclusion-

The future of postcolonial studies is intricately linked to environmental studies, particularly in the context of global warming. This evolving discourse expands beyond traditional identity and power dynamics to include the experiences of refugees and marginalized groups affected by climate change. Europe emerges as a new frontier in postcolonial studies, emphasizing the impact on subalterns within the global economy.

Climate change challenges conventional notions of human agency, introducing the concept of the Anthropocene, where humans act as a geophysical force. This necessitates a shift in perspective, urging scholars to consider nonontological modes of existence. Climate change is portrayed as a "wicked problem," demanding interdisciplinary approaches that blend science, technology, rhetoric, and art.

In summary, the future trajectory of postcolonial and environmental studies involves a holistic examination of our interconnected global reality. Scholars are challenged to navigate uncharted territories, bridging humanistic and scientific perspectives, and addressing the complex, multifaceted nature of climate change as a political issue. Interdisciplinary collaboration is essential as forces of globalization intersect with the environmental crisis, pushing the boundaries of understanding and encouraging innovative solutions.

references cited -

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change." New Literary History, vol. 43, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–18. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23259358. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.

Koch, Alexander, et al. "Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492." Quaternary Science Reviews, Jan. 2019, Science Direct, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261.

Milman, Oliver. "European Colonization of Americas Killed so Many It Cooled Earth’s Climate." The Guardian, 31 Jan. 2019. www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/31/european-colonization-of-americas-helped-cause-climate-change?CMP=share_btn_link.

Stoll, Mary Lyn. "Environmental Colonialism." The SAGE Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society, 2018, doi:10.4135/9781483381503.n393.

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