Abstract Book of the 11th International Conference on Social Sciences, Humanities, and Education
Year: 2025
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A Study of the Postcolonial Economy of Disaster Tourism
Noduli Pulu
ABSTRACT:
In the last decade, environmental advocacy in postcolonial nations has refurbished with the reappraisal of the universal implementation of first-world Environmentalism. Heading this line of assessment are writers like Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez Alier who have in their seminal work Varieties of Environment: Essays North and South (1997) advocated for ‘environmentalism of the poor’. It is an environmental thought and practice that harbors the various intersections of disenfranchised groups and vocalizes their campaigns for justice against the exploitative schemes of the more advantaged. By overlooking the socio-environmental facet and building strict parameters in its theorizing and implementation, they’ve argued that western environmentalism integrally disregards substantial peripheral human residents of the Earth. This paper conjectures that a chief manifestation of environmental anxiety in postcolonial literature is in its engagement with topographies. Landscape and borders are not merely employed as a setting, or to mark cultural and social parameters but become the locus from which to interrogate historiography, imperialism, skewed politics of migration and environmental ethics. Within the purview of this research proposition, the paper will explore narratives of postcolonial ecologies under the tenets of the environmental justice ethics. An important question raised will be: how do authors and citizens enable and resist the commodification of subaltern ecological crisis and ecologically ravaged landscapes? For this, a study of the cross fertilization between activism and literature, largely the rise of author-activists in Postcolonial locations of South East Asia since the 2000s will be important. Narratives of post-catastrophe tourism and the exercise of the writer’s environmental activism in the stylistic and thematic treatment of their work will also be studied.
Keywords: author-activist, commodification, environmental justice, postcolonialism, subaltern