Forest Degradation, Animal Extinction and Nature Conservation in Contemporary Literature

Drawing upon the concepts of “externality” (Clark, 2008) and “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011), this thesis writes back to the western imagining of the forest as an outside space that, located outside of and away from civilisation and culture, legitimises the abuse of nonhuman nature. It is the discourse of outsiderness that, operating through a humannonhuman dichotomy, reduces forest inhabitants to mere resources and licenses the capitalist and imperialist exploitation of human labour and nonhuman life. Nonhuman nature and colonized, Indigenous human communities are translated as exploitable and ungrievable lives, thus illuminating the twinned social and ecological injustices produced within a capitalist and imperialist context. In interrogating the western discourse of outsiderness that imagines nature as “‘out there’, never ‘in here’” (Adams, 2003, pp. 42 - 43) and extinction “as something that happens ‘over there’ or out in ‘nature’” (van Dooren, 2014, p. 5), this thesis posits that forests, made up of vibrant multispecies communities, are not interchangeable and replaceable habitats. They are unique ecological spaces that support the flourishing of particular human communities and animal and arboreal species that are tied to distinctive lifeways whilst being situated within interspecies assemblages and heritages. Since ‘habitat’ is a relatively understudied subject in literary animal studies (Menely, 2023, p. 186), my thesis contributes to the existing scholarship by positing that an understanding of forest degradation and animal extinction cannot be divorced from a concomitant examination of their political and spatiotemporal contexts. It does so by analysing three contemporary works of literature that not only foreground the forest as habitat but also illuminate how the unique material conditions that make forests inhabitable to human and nonhuman inhabitants are being slowly suspended by the capitalist and imperialist exploitation of nature. These are: Jean Marie Gustave Le Clézio’s Alma (2017), Dalene Matthee’s Circles in a Forest (1984) and Tania James’s The Tusk that Did the Damage (2015). Alma (2017) examines the life and extinction of the dodos as they coexist with the maroons in the forest on the Dutch colonial island of Mauritius; Circles in a Forest (1984), unfolding in British colonial South Africa, explores the quotidian orientation, lifeway and vanishing of the Knysna elephants who coexist with the impoverished woodcutters in the Knysna forest; and The Tusk that Did the Damage (2015) centres on the inherited and ongoing human-wildlife conflict between the elephants and rural poor living on the fringes of the fictional Kavanar wildlife park forest in post-colonial India. In transporting the reader to their specific forest habitats and enabling the reader to affectively draw close to the forest inhabitants, these novels disrupt the discourse of outsiderness by rendering proximal, intimate and perceptible the “slow violence” of forest degradation and animal extinction.