Environmental Humanities in SEA

In Decolonising the Mind (1986), Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o claims that “language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we perceive ourselves and our place in the world” (15). The ASEAN region is made up of several nations with their distinct cultures and languages. To claim cultural homogeneity based on a political affiliation might appear at best foolhardy and at worst contrived. Therefore, in bringing together ecocritical insights, scholarship and creative works centred on and generated from around ASEAN, we are not attempting to homogenise or indeed make a claim for any coherence in our varied and distinctive traditions. Instead, we are attempting to promote the idea that strong intersections and cross-pollinations have occurred over several centuries within the region. These intersections have produced a variety of genres, both classical and modern, that display diverse approaches to nature eminently worth exploring.

There have been few ecocritical explorations that have specifically focused on Southeast Asia. John Charles Ryan’s Ecocriticism in Southeast Asia, Pham, Sankaran and Kaur’s Ecologies in Southeast Asian Literatures and Sankaran’s Women, Subalterns and Ecologies in South and Southeast Asian Women’s Fiction are some of the pioneering scholarly works in the field of Southeast Asian ecocriticism. The aim of all these works has been to acknowledge the idea of not only geographical contiguity with its attendant risks brought on by ‘Second Modernity’ as Ulrich Beck, the German sociologist of Risk Society, labels it, but also cultural commonalities that are shared despite the distinctive cultures and histories unique to each country within the collective. The idea that gets foregrounded is ‘dwelling’, that Greg Garrard terms the long-term imbrication of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry and death. Along with ‘dwelling’ arises the idea of common risks faced and overcome by a collective. The time has come for ASEAN to work as a collective in understanding how we are placed in facing the climate crisis since this is no respecter of national boundaries.

But this common approach to risk does not appear spontaneously since we are trained to think within national collectives. One factor that might be of help is to trace the landscape of memory. To this end it is worthwhile to consider the common ‘Sino-Indic ancestry’ which emerges with the predominance of Buddhism and with subtle influence of Hinduism that shows up all over ASEAN. The imbrication of the Hindu Ramayana and its claim by nations across ASEAN as an intrinsic aspect of their indigenous culture being a case in point. These perspectives are important in offering a counter vision to one increasingly driven by global capitalism and narratives of gain amidst competition. The increasing scholarship that has emerged from Southeast Asia on these topics inspired the inauguration of the Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism, which has been hyperlinked to this site.     

The LitENV project therefore aims to be a platform to slant a scholarly mirror to our collective efforts to approach the climate crisis. It will collect and present information about all current scholarship that is related to and has relevance to the field of Environmental Humanities in ASEAN. To this end, this website strives to provide readers with current information about the following:

  • Foundational articles on Environmental Humanities in general
  • Ecofictions (both novels and short stories on the global environmental crisis) in ASEAN
  • Scholarship on Environmental Humanities in ASEAN
  • Articles and literary works pertaining to World Literature and Environmental Humanities in South and Southeast Asia

We hope this resource will be of use to all scholars and students interested in exploring environmental humanities in ASEAN region.

-Chitra Sankaran