While news reports about Pakistan tend to cover Taliban attacks and bombings, and academics focus on security issues, the environment often takes a backseat in media reportage and scholarship. In particular, Pakistani women’s attachment to their environment and their environmental concerns are almost always ignored. Shazia Rahman traces the ways in which Pakistani women explore alternative, environmental modes of belonging, examines the vitality of place-based identities within Pakistani culture, and thereby contributes to evolving understandings of Pakistani women—in relation to both their environment and to various discourses of nation and patriarchy. Through an astute analysis of such works as Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani (2003), Mehreen Jabbar’s Ramchand Pakistani (2008), Sorayya Khan’s Noor (2006), Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing (2003), and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009), Rahman illuminates how Pakistani women’s creative works portray how people live with one another, deal with their environment, and intuit their relationship with the spiritual. She considers how literary and cinematic documentation of place-based identities simultaneously critiques and counters stereotypes of Pakistan as a country of religious nationalism and oppressive patriarchy. Rahman’s analysis discloses fresh perspectives for thinking about the relationship between social and environmental justice.

While news reports about Pakistan tend to cover Taliban attacks and bombings, and academics focus on security issues, the environment often takes a backseat in media reportage and scholarship. In particular, Pakistani women's attachment to their environment and their environmental concerns are almost always ignored. Shazia Rahman traces the ways in which Pakistani women explore alternative, environmental modes of belonging, examines the vitality of place-based identities within Pakistani culture, and thereby contributes to evolving understandings of Pakistani women--in relation to both their environment and to various discourses of nation and patriarchy. Through an astute analysis of such works as Sabiha Sumar's Khamosh Pani (2003), Mehreen Jabbar's Ramchand Pakistani (2008), Sorayya Khan's Noor (2006), Uzma Aslam Khan's Trespassing (2003), and Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows (2009), Rahman illuminates how Pakistani women's creative works portray how people live with one another, deal with their environment, and intuit their relationship with the spiritual. She considers how literary and cinematic documentation of place-based identities simultaneously critiques and counters stereotypes of Pakistan as a country of religious nationalism and oppressive patriarchy. Rahman's analysis discloses fresh perspectives for thinking about the relationship between social and environmental justice.

After uncovering the oppressive dichotomies of male/female and nature/culture that underlie contemporary environmental problems, Feminist Ecocriticism focuses specifically on emancipatory strategies employed by ecofeminist literary critics as antidotes, asking what our lives might be like as those strategies become increasingly successful in overcoming oppression. Thus, ecofeminism is not limited to the critique of literature, but also helps identify and articulate liberatory ideals that can be actualized in the real world, in the process transforming everyday life. Providing an alternative to rugged individualism, for example, ecofeminist literature promotes a more fulfilling sense of interrelationship with both community and the land. In the process of exploring literature from ecofeminist perspectives, the book reveals strategies of emancipation that have already begun to give rise to more hopeful ecological narratives.

Why is ecofeminism still needed to address the environmental emergencies and challenges of our times? Ecofeminism has a chequered history in terms of its popularity and its perceived value in conceptualizing the relationship between gender and nature as well as feeding forms of activism that aim to confront the environmental challenges of the moment. This book provides a much-needed comprehensive overview of the relevance and value of using eco-feminist theories. It gives a broad coverage of traditional and emerging eco-feminist theories and explores, across a range of chapters, their various contributions and uniquely spans various strands of ecofeminist thinking. The origins of influential eco-feminist theories are discussed including key themes and some of its leading figures (contributors include Erika Cudworth, Greta Gaard, Trish Glazebrook and Niamh Moore), and outlines its influence on how scholars might come to a more generative understanding of the natural environment. The book examines eco-feminism’s potential contribution for advancing current discussions and research on the relationships between the humans and more than humans that share our world. This timely volume makes a distinctive scholarly contribution and is a valuable resources for students and academics in the fields of environmentalism, political ecology, sustainability and nature resource management.

Ecocriticism has emerged as one of the most fascinating and rapidly growing fields of recent literary and cultural studies. From its regional origins in late-twentieth-century Anglo-American academia, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, which involves a decidedly transdisciplinary and transnational paradigm that promises to return a new sense of relevance to research and teaching in the humanities. A distinctive feature of the present handbook in comparison with other survey volumes is the combination of ecocriticism with cultural ecology, reflecting an emphasis on the cultural transformation of ecological processes and on the crucial role of literature, art, and other forms of cultural creativity for the evolution of societies towards sustainable futures. In state-of-the-art contributions by leading international scholars in the field, this handbook maps some of the most important developments in contemporary ecocritical thought. It introduces key theoretical concepts, issues, and directions of ecocriticism and cultural ecology and demonstrates their relevance for the analysis of texts and other cultural phenomena.

Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction (now Women's Prize for Fiction) Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. Hiroko Tanaka watches her lover from the veranda as he leaves. Sunlight streams across Urakami Valley, and then the world goes white. In the devastating aftermath of the atomic bomb, Hiroko leaves Japan in search of new beginnings. From Delhi, amid India's cry for independence from British colonial rule, to New York City in the immediate wake of 9/11, to the novel's astonishing climax in Afghanistan, a violent history casts its shadow the entire world over. Sweeping in its scope and mesmerizing in its evocation of time and place, this is a tale of love and war, of three generations, and three world-changing historic events. Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows is an enthralling meta-cultural epic, the panoramic tale of two families tangled together in some of the most devastating conflicts of modern history.

This is an exploration of the philosophical and political challenge of ecofeminism. It shows how the ecology movement has been held back by conceptual confusion over the implications of gender difference, while much that passes in the name of feminism is actually an obstacle to ecological change and global democracy. The author argues that ecofeminism reaches beyond contemporary social movements, being a synthesis of four revolutions in one: ecology is feminism is socialism is post-colonial struggle. Informed by a critical postmodern reading of the Marxist tradition, Salleh's ecofeminism integrates discourses on science, the body, culture, nature and political economy. The book opens with a short history of ecofeminism. Part Two establishes the basis for its epistemological challenge, while the third part consists of ecofeminist deconstructions of deep ecology, social ecology, ecosocialism and postmodern feminism. In the final section Salleh suggests that a powerful way forward can be found in commonalities between ecofeminist and indigenous struggles.

Exploring environmental literature from a feminist perspective, this volume presents a diversity of feminist ecocritical approaches to affirm the continuing contributions, relevance, and necessity of a feminist perspective in environmental literature, culture, and science. Feminist ecocriticism has a substantial history, with roots in second- and third-wave feminist literary criticism, women’s environmental writing and social change activisms, and eco-cultural critique, and yet both feminist and ecofeminist literary perspectives have been marginalized. The essays in this collection build on the belief that the repertoire of violence (conceptual and literal) toward nature and women comprising our daily lives must become central to our ecocritical discussions, and that basic literacy in theories about ethics are fundamental to these discussions. The book offers an international collection of scholarship that includes ecocritical theory, literary criticism, and ecocultural analyses, bringing a diversity of perspectives in terms of gender, sexuality, and race. Reconnecting with the histories of feminist and ecofeminist literary criticism, and utilizing new developments in postcolonial ecocriticism, animal studies, queer theory, feminist and gender studies, cross-cultural and international ecocriticism, this timely volume develops a continuing and international feminist ecocritical perspective on literature, language, and culture.

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.

Deane Curtin puts today's most important social and environmental ethical issues into their historical, political, and philosophical contexts, and offers deep insights into the nature of our freedom and its relation to justice in our globalized, commercialized culture. Using familiar literary and historical icons to make surprising points about colonial attitudes and practices, he also demonstrates the unique linkages between colonialism and environmentalism. Using an array of well-documented cases from around the world, Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World is an accessible and very readable book ideal for students of environmental ethics, globalization, environmental politics, or environmental political theory, as well as for anyone interested in policy and practical options for change.