Romancing the Environment

Romesh Gunesekera's Reef and Heaven's Edge

Bibliographic Data

ID11677707
AuthorsShalini Rupesh Jain (National University of Singapore, corresponding author), Shalini Jain (National University of Singapore)
Year2012
Volume33
Issue3
Pages29-49
Publication date2012-12-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSouth Asian Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0275-9527 • E-ISSN: 2573-9476
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/02759527.2012.11932894
OpenAlexW2772821371
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited16

Romesh Gunesekera's novels Reef (1994) and Heaven's Edge (2003) signal the multi-layered connections between the sociopolitical disintegration of Sri Lanka from civil war and the destruction of its natural ecosystems. However, the narratives' ecocritical interventions, informed by its exotic and erotic registers, run the danger of objectifying, gendering and colonizing nature and reinforcing the human-nature binary in asymmetrical power relations. The representations of landscapes and waterscapes here call into question the ethics of human engagement with the natural world and the ecological dangers of an attenuated phenomenological connection with nature that celebrates sensory interactions but eschews human agency and responsibility toward conservation

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Archaeology · Art · Ecocriticism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Heaven · Literature · Narrative · Natural (archaeology · Non-human · Power (physics · Social science · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub