Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction: J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness
Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction: J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness
复制标题
近期南非小说中的生态学定位：J.M.库切的《动物的一生》和扎克斯·姆达的《红色的心》
DOI：
10.1080/03057070500109482
复制
发表时间：
2005
影响因子：
0.5
通讯作者：
A. Vital
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
A. Vital
受该国向民主政府转型的影响，南非的环保主义文化在 20 世纪 90 年代发生了变化。种族隔离时代的环保主义保留了早期殖民地保护利益的特征，但随着政治变革，出现了以“以人为本”的方式将环境和社会福祉联系起来的趋势。这种新文化可以被理解为对生态学的后殖民理解的发展，这种理解掌握了殖民主义的持续影响以及南非目前在北方国家（特别是美国）主导的全球秩序中的定位。在这种背景下，生态学与后殖民政治有着深刻的联系。本文阅读了南非作家 J.M. Coetzee 和 Zakes Mda 最近的两部散文小说，反对环境文化的这些发展，声称它们对生态产生了类似的含义。他们利用后现代策略来破坏意义的稳定，在当前的社会和文化秩序中阐明了精心界定的生态价值。文章认为，南非新兴的环境文化也可以提供限制小说作品阅读的方式。
The culture of environmentalism in South Africa changed through the 1990s, influenced by the country's transition to democratic government. Environmentalism during the apartheid era retained features of an earlier colonial interest in conservation, but with the political change, tendencies have emerged that link environmental and social well-being in ways that are ‘people-centred’. This new culture can be understood as developing a postcolonial understanding of ecology, one that grasps the continued influence of colonialism as well as the present positioning of South Africa within a global order dominated by countries of the North (and in particular the United States). Ecology in this context is deeply implicated in a postcolonial politics. This article reads two recent works of prose fiction by South African writers, J.M. Coetzee and Zakes Mda, against these developments in the environmental culture, claiming that they develop a similar implication for ecology. Drawing on postmodern strategies to destabilise meaning, they articulate a carefully circumscribed value for ecology within current social and cultural orders. The article suggests that South Africa's emerging environmental culture can also provide ways of reading limits to the works of fiction.