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Hunger in the Garden: Shortage and Environmental Aesthetics in Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Austin Hetrick
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Abstract

This essay, a reading of Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974), seeks to reconcile the promise of global environmental aesthetics with postcolonial theories of difference. While the Anthropocene is often framed as universal and unprecedented, Gordimer's ironic presentation of an earlier discourse—centered on resource limits and population bombs—demonstrates that certain themes have existed in the global environmental imagination for decades. Read alongside the history of South African conservation and Judith Butler's theory of precarity, he Conservationist develops an alternative green aesthetic, one that considers environmental problems to be produced by diverse and unequal social relations. Gordimer's dialectical response to apartheid-era conservation (an emphasis on utopianism and haunting) offers insight into South Africa's contemporary environmental politics and into ongoing debates in the environmental humanities about the value of the central analytic strategies of postcolonialism.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 3 , May 2019 , pp. 491 - 506
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

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