Postcolonial Ecopoetics: The Poetry of Planetary Precarity

Examining a wide variety of poets from the last three decades of the 20th century to the present, from Asian, African, South American and settler colonies such as Canada and Australia, Pramod K. Nayar maps a poetry of ecological care, vulnerability and resilience.

While environmental fiction has been widely studied, environmental poetry has not received the same level of attention. In Postcolonial Poetry and the Environment, Nayar studies the work of over 50 poets from the Global South and the formerly colonized, including John Kinsella, Tanure Ojaide, Linda Hogan, Kofi Awonoor, Okot p’Bitek, Ben Okri, and Sherwin Bitsui. He traces an ecological consciousness that cuts across human and nonhuman, living and non-living domains. This book is interested in the making, unmaking and remaking of worlds and meanings in the age of cataclysmic climate shifts, while aware of the histories that fashioned the planet in unjust and unequal ways, and to which the poets bear witness, as well as proposing alternative ways of seeing and meaning-making.

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His most recent books include Vulnerable Earth: TheLiterature of Climate Crisis (2024), Nuclear Cultures (2023) Alzheimer’s Disease Memoirs (2021), The Human Rights Graphic Novel (2021), Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture (2019), Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity and the Biopolitical Uncanny (2017), and others. His essays have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, South Asian Review, South Asia, Narrative, Celebrity Studies, Asiatic, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Prose Studies, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Biography, and Postcolonial Text, among others. Nayar also holds the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad.