RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

Environmental Criticism 63). Colonial map-making disregards the sedimentary thickness
of a region‘s history so it can reproduce the institutional conditions necessary for the
experience of an imperial center. Lawrence Buell offers five categories of ―placeconnectedness,‖
and of the two dealing with temporal dimensions, colonists ignore the
region‘s prior history and the prior inhabitants‘ memory of the region (Writing for an
Endangered World 64-68). 43 Achille‘s and Philoctete‘s search for an innocent place to
start over exemplifies the neocolonial motivation to de-historicize the wilderness and
isolate island landmasses from the archipelagos in which they reside. Colonial and
neocolonial modernity violently re-constructs sacred sites of wilderness and subsistence
hunting, fishing, and farming areas into expensive real estate, hotels, industrial zones,
museums, and national parks. Narratives that motivate the search for a sense of place in a
postcolonial context must respond to the significant challenge of history by answering the
question of how to regain a place after the map-makers and bulldozers have irrevocably
altered the region.
Rob Nixon argues that postcolonial studies have been slow to articulate an
environmental ethos because the postcolonial preference for ―cross culturalization‖
antagonizes the ecocritical preference for ―virgin wilderness‖ (235). The initiation of
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43 Subjects relate to a place both spatially and temporally. Spatial senses of place either
emanate outward in concentric circles of decreasing intimacy from a ―central point‖ (64),
such as a first name, parent, or hearth, or, they scatter across a ―patchwork of specific
entanglements that make up one‘s primary life routines‖ (66), constituting an archipelago
of familiar places. Temporally, individuals layer the places they remember onto the
regions they inhabit. As an example, Buell describes Gary Snyder‘s northern California
as ―a palimpsest of contemporary rurality, Asian classical learning, travel reminiscence,
and native mythography and folklore‖ (66-67). Just as individuals remember and
continually form layered places, the localities ―themselves are not stable, free-standing
entities‖ (67), but dynamic processes. Buell‘s last category of place is neither spatial nor
temporal, but the ―dream of a rightful homeland‖ (71) that subjects may never have seen,
such as Zion or Palestine.