ENGL 63.31 Big Game: Adventure, Empire, Ecology
This course asks how the era of imperial expansion and the study of “natural history” feeds our contemporary ecological crisis. We will begin with readings of influential colonial travel and adventure narratives like Robinson Crusoe, the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson, sections of Darwin and Captain Cook’s travel journals, and in-class work with archival materials like the Indian Botanical Survey Flora. In the first weeks, we will consider how the aesthetics of adventure circulated throughout the British empire in both the East Indies and India, and ramified elsewhere in the Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Belgian holdings. We’ll end with a suite of readings and films that help us locate productive intersections between ecocriticism and postcolonial studies, drawing together sensationalist disaster journalism with environmental activism emerging from the Global South. This course will be especially of interest to students with a focus in environmental studies, nineteenth century history and literature, history of science, or environmental activism.