Transcultural Ecocriticism ii Transcultural Ecocriticism Global, Romantic and Decolonial Perspectives Edited by Stuart Cooke and Peter Denney BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Stuart Cooke, Peter Denney and contributors, 2021 Stuart Cooke, Peter Denney and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image: Ocean currents map, 1876 © Getty Images All rights reserved. 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ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-2163-8 ePDF: 978-1-3501-2164-5 eBook: 978-1-3501-2165-2 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. Contents List of figures vii Notes on contributors viii Acknowledgements xii 1 Thinking about transcultural ecocriticism: Space, scale and translation Stuart Cooke and Peter Denney 1 Part I Planetary localities 2 Urban narrative and climate change Ursula K. Heise 21 3 Scaling down our imagination of the human: Ted Chiang and the fable of extinction Chris Danta 41 4 ‘Re-enchanting the world’ from Mozambique: The African Anthropocene and Mia Couto’s poetics of the planet Meg Samuelson 63 5 Ecological imaginations in contemporary Chinese science fiction Mengtian Sun 82 Part II Beyond the romantic frontier 6 The colonial translation of natures Alan Bewell 103 7 Sensing empire: Travel writing, picturesque taste and British perceptions of the Indian sensory environment Peter Denney 124 8 The dark side of romantic dendrophilia Ve-Yin Tee 148 9 Shaping selves and spaces: Romanticism, botany and south-west Western Australia Jessica White 169 Part III Decolonial poetics 10 Transcultural ecopoetics and decoloniality in meenamatta lena narla puellakanny: Meenamatta Water Country Discussion Peter Minter 191 vi Contents 11 Theorizing decolonized literary environments Stephen Muecke 221 12 Placing invisible women: Environment, space and power in two works by Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim Maia Gunn Watkinson 238 13 Geoterritorial island poetics, or transcultural composition with a wetland in southern Chile Stuart Cooke, with Juan Paulo Huirimilla Oyarzo 262 Index 283 Figures 6.1 Title page from Thomas Pennant’s Arctic Zoology (1784) 104 6.2 Engraving of George Stubb’s The Duke of Richmond’s First Bull Moose in Thomas Pennant’s Arctic Zoology (1784) 105 6.3 From Edward Topsell’s History of Four-Footed Beasts (1607) 106 8.1 ‘The Pleystow, vulg: The Plestor’, in Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (London: Bensley, 1789) 150 8.2 Swilcar Oak (in Needwood Forest) Staffordshire 160 8.3 ‘Bleeding Heart’ is not only a pejorative label that can be applied to an environmentalist, it is also the name of a tree with red, heart-shaped leaves that is indigenous to Australia 161 10.1 Jonathan Kimberley and puralia meenamatta (Jim Everett), beyond the colonial construct: meenamatta map of unlandscape [2006, synthetic polymer, charcoal and text on linen, 240 x 240 cm (four panels)] and meenamatta lena walantanalinany (meenamatta water country) (2006, synthetic polymer and charcoal on linen, 240 x 240 cm (four panels)) 199 10.2 Jonathan Kimberley and puralia meenamatta (Jim Everett), balouina miengalina bagota: blood juice cloud (meenamatta tomato) (2006, synthetic polymer, charcoal and text on linen, 182 x 182 cm (four panels)) 210 10.3 Jonathan Kimberley and puralia meenamatta (Jim Everett), Key to writing: beyond the colonial construct: meenamatta map of unlandscape (2006, from Puralia (Jim Everett) Meenamatta and Jonathan Kimberley, Meenamatta Lena Narla Puellakanny: Meenamatta Water Country Discussion. A Writing and Painting Collaboration (Hobart: Bett Gallery and Devonport Gallery, 2006), p. 41) 212 Contributors Alan Bewell is Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His primary research field is British Romanticism, focusing on colonialism, ecopoetics, science, medicine and literature. His most recent monograph, Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History (2017), examines the ways in which the global transport and exchange of plants, animals and natural commodities transformed global natures and shaped how British writers and Indigenous peoples came to understand themselves and their natures. He is currently working on a book entitled Romanticism and Mobility, which studies how Romantics reacted to a world of moving people, things and ideas. Stuart Cooke is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Griffith University. He has authored the book Speaking the Earth’s Languages: A Theory for Australian-Chilean Postcolonial Poetics (2013) and the poetry collections Lyre (2019), Opera (2016) and Edge Music (2011). He writes on eco-, etho- and ethno-poetics, with particular interests in non-human art and transcultural theory. He has also translated a variety of Indigenous and non- Indigenous poets from Spanish and Portuguese. Chris Danta is Associate Professor of English at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. His research operates at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, science and theology. He is the author of Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (Bloomsbury, 2011) and, more recently, Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor (2018). Peter Denney is Senior Lecturer in History at Griffith University. His research focuses on the literature and history of Britain in the long eighteenth century, paying particular attention to landscape, poverty, the senses, popular culture and political radicalism. He has recently co-edited Sound, Space and Civility in the British World, 1700-1850 (2019) and Politics and Emotions in Romantic Periodicals (2019). He is also completing a monograph on landscape and soundscape in Britain from Defoe to Cobbett. Contributors ix Ursula K. Heise is Chair of the English Department at UCLA. She also holds the Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies at the Department of English and is co-founder of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature and the environmental humanities; environmental literature, arts and cultures in the Americas, Western Europe and Japan; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory. Her books include Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science.  She is editor of the series Natures, Cultures, and the Environment, and producer and writer of the documentary Urban Ark Los Angeles (2018). Juan Paulo Huirimilla Oyarzo was born on the island of Calbuco, Chile, in 1973. Widely published and anthologized, his poems have been translated into Catalán, Dutch, English, Galician and German. His books include El ojo de vidrio (2001), Canto para niños de Chile (2005) and Palimpsesto (2005), and he is the editor of the anthology Cantos de guerrero (2012). He has also written various essays on Huilliche culture and poetics. Huirimilla works as a supervisor of Indigenous language (Mapudungun) education and as a lecturer in arts education at La Universidad de Los Lagos, Puerto Montt. Peter Minter is a poet, poetry editor and writer on poetry and poetics. He teaches Indigenous Studies, Creative Writing and Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. His books include the poetry collections blue grass (2016) and Empty Texas (1999), and with Anita Heiss he edited The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature (2008). Stephen Muecke is Professor of Creative Writing in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University, South Australia, and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His recent books are Latour and the Humanities, edited with Rita Felski (2020) and The Children’s Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia, co-authored with Paddy Roe (2020).