ESC: English Studies in Canada

Kevin Hutchings’s project for Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British-Atlantic World is to “open up a dialogue between (post) colonial and ecocritical approaches to Romantic scholarship” (14). After a brief survey of ecocritical writing about Romanticism, which highlights the “political problems” (10) infesting various attempts to write about or indeed distinguish something sometimes called nature, he notes approvingly the recent development of “a sort of critical double-vision” in ecocriticism, concerned “to understand the materiality of nature, on the one hand, and the politics of nature’s representation, on the other” (11). This is good because “an insistent awareness of the history of nature’s conceptual politics promotes a necessary critical vigilance that can help to prevent an unwitting reinscription of various modes of tyranny” (11). Thus may one avoid “violent reactionary thought” (12) of the kind, for example, that once or might still characterize some beings or behaviours as “natural” and some not and that certainly might still vitiate our understanding of transatlantic (post)colonial relationships. [End Page 117]

Edward Said, Hutchings finds, models for the present work the sought-for “two-pronged or dialectical critical approach” (16). But its more immediate precursors are identified as Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease and Beth Fowkes Tobin’s Colonizing Nature, upon which Hutchings wishes to build in order to “clarify the related colonial and ecological aspects of Romantic literary history and poetics” (15). James C. McKusick’s “transatlantic insights” (20) are also saluted as “larger comparative contexts” (24) are invoked on the way to discovering a radical hybridity in the Atlantic world. This hybridity, in its customary fashion, denies or obviates questions of dominant influences or, to be more precise, “the generative importance of priority,” in Susan Manning’s phrase (22). Any such primacy must of course be denied to the British or Europeans (except in certain deplorable areas—there is no such thing as progress) but also, for everyone’s sakes, to the environments in question—to nature.

Chapter 1 thus begins with a brief discussion of “Stadial Theory,” framed as “an ideology of racial and cultural hierarchy” used by colonial governments to “justify” the transformation of “whole ecosystems [and] the lifeways that those ecosystems had supported for thousands of years” (27). First, however, Hutchings must concede that “to some extent” the theory’s “model of cultural development issued a philosophical challenge to essentialist paradigms of racial identity” and might even tend to associate Europe with “moral decadence” (35). Furthermore, it may have “grounded racial and cultural identity in nature,” but it also did so in “history” and was “appropriated to support a diverse array of arguments about the relationship between ecologies and cultures” (36), including those mounted by abolitionists like Amelia Opie and Olaudah Equiano. Despite this concession, he soon speaks of “the philosophical poverty of European theory” (37) as firmly demonstrated. That, for example, “the fact that women from ‘civilized’ Western societies identified so insistently with the condition of African slaves offers [an] ironic commentary on stadial theory” (39). In all, the section feels too brief for the importance of its topic and the scale of its claims. At times, Hutchings seems to be conducting his own argument against slavery and its violent and reactionary apologists of the day—his fiery descriptions of abuses and sufferings serves this somewhat anachronistic purpose more effectively than they do an analysis of the role of stadial theory in its own right, let alone that of the moral and practical conceptions of human development that flowed from it. These foes were and are perhaps more formidable than such treatment implies. And the question of the ecological implications of the theory recedes considerably during this section, as ecological questions do in much of the book. [End Page 118]

The next section, on “Environmental Determinism,” has a clearer link to things green. Here, too, concessions are offered—again, that the writers of whom we now approve made use...