Reclaiming the Earth and the Body: An Eco-Feminist Post-Colonial Reading of Environmental Discourse in English Literature

<p>The intertwined legacies of colonialism, patriarchy, and environmental exploitation have produced a complex network of oppression that finds vivid representation in post-colonial literature. Eco-criticism has sought to foreground environmental concerns in literary studies, while eco-feminism has drawn attention to the parallel oppressions of women and nature under patriarchal-capitalist systems. Post-colonial theory further complicates this discourse by situating ecological degradation within histories of imperial expansion and resource extraction. This paper brings together these three theoretical perspectives to examine the ways in which selected works of post-colonial English literature—Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather, Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things—interrogate the exploitation of both land and body. Drawing on the scholarship of Cheryll Glotfelty, Vandana Shiva, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rob Nixon, and others, the paper argues that these texts not only document ecological and social injustice but also present indigenous, feminist, and ecologically sustainable alternatives to dominant capitalist and neo-imperialist paradigms. By analysing the gendered metaphors of land, the silencing of indigenous ecological knowledge, and the literary strategies of resistance, the article positions post-colonial eco-feminist literature as a critical space for imagining decolonised ecological futures.</p>