Irish Ecomedia: Empire and Environmental Justice in the Modernization of Postcolonial Ireland

The environmental impacts of empire on Ireland’s past and future

Ireland was Britain’s first colony and its first imperial laboratory--the place where many colonial methods were tested before being exported to the farther-flung portions of the empire. In Irish Ecomedia, Katherine M. Huber examines the environmental impacts of imperial rule and the various ways they have been expressed and rearticulated over time. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism, ecomedia studies, and other avant-garde critical methods, Huber considers multiple media at distinct moments of modernization in Ireland and shows how artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers have challenged dominant narratives of development. Through photography, literature, film, radio, and music, this book reveals alternatives to colonial practices of enclosure and extraction that sacrifice peoples and places in the name of progress. The media, cultural, and environmental resources upon which Irish people and communities have drawn to assert agency bear witness to existent postcolonial modernities that promise more socially and environmentally just futures.

Katherine M. Huber is Assistant Professor of Digital Art, Ecology, and Communication in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University.