A Postcolonial Tale of Nature: The Postcolonial Eco-Poetics of Jack London's The Call of the Wild

مصطفى, وائل مصطفى الصاوي

doi:10.21608/qarts.2022.114461.1334

A Postcolonial Tale of Nature: The Postcolonial Eco-Poetics of Jack London's The Call of the Wild

نوع المستند : المقالة الأصلية

المؤلف

وائل مصطفى الصاوي مصطفى

مدرس النقد والنظرية الأدبية - جامعة الامام محمد بن سعود الاسلامية

10.21608/qarts.2022.114461.1334

المستخلص

This paper is an attempt to map out the politics of postcolonial eco-poetics and its application to Jack London's novella, The Call of the Wild (1903). As an interdisciplinary field, postcolonial eco-poetics emerges from the intersection of postcolonial literary theory with an ecological approach to colonialism and anthropocentrism. Both theories put all forms of domination, oppression, hierarchy, and marginalisation into question to subvert any type of authority or hegemony over the "Other", whether human or non-human. The emerging theory grasps the deep implication of ecology in postcolonial politics. As a critical theory, it is a way of reading and rereading literary texts to create a critical discourse that radically decentres the centre, subverts binary oppositions, and gives hegemony to the marginalized nature. Consequently, postcolonial eco-poetical discourse emerges as a reaction against the anthropocentric essentialist discourse with its exclusionary and hegemonic politics. Anthropocentrism is one of the central modes of oppressive representation that believes in human beings as the only and the fixed centre of the cosmos. Postcolonial eco-poetics, thus, establishes an ecological approach that challenges colonial oppression and injustice and meanwhile struggles against environmental and animal abuse. The paper, thus, delineates four paradigms that characterise postcolonial eco-poetics: the mimic, the dialogic, the carnivalesque, and the nomadic. These four paradigms are fully discussed as constituents of the literary theory of postcolonial eco-poetics. This paper reads Jack London's The Call of the Wild (1903) as a manifestation of these paradigms. It, thus, suggests that the theoretical perspective of postcolonial eco-poetics promises to offer a new interpretative scope for rereading literary texts.

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