Narratives of Nature and Memory from the Global South: Literature’s Role in Heritage and Environmental Preservation

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-533-1_18How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Nature; Memory; Culture; Heritage; Ecology; Ecocriticism

Abstract

This paper explores nature, collective memory, and cultural heritage in postcolonial literatures of the Global South, analysing Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. It demonstrates how landscapes are treated as more than mere settings, and hence, integral to the construction of collective memory and postcolonial identity. Using postcolonial discourse, particularly the works of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, the study interacts with the select texts in the context of colonisation and the cultural dislocations that accompany forced migrations, and socio-environmental marginalisation. Through the lens of ecocriticism (Rob Nixon, Ursula Heise), it shows nature becoming a site of renewal as well as resistance against capitalist exploitation or environmental destruction. Memory studies (Pierre Nora, Marianne Hirsch) provide a framework to think through remembering, archiving, and bringing back to life mostly fractured or silenced memories (personal/ collective) through narratives. Magic realism serves as a connective logic for these texts, operating on the premise of memory allowing the once voiceless and muted landscapes/history to be known and resurrected, but at the same time, we are reminded that cultural landscape and the environment are not to be privileged over one another as they are interconnected. Finally, the study argues that literatures from the Global South are a significant site of resistance, memory, and ecology, and critically engages a rethinking of heritage that is inclusive, context-specific, and ecologically aware.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jasmine A. Choudhury
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/31
TI  - Narratives of Nature and Memory from the Global South: Literature’s Role in Heritage and Environmental Preservation
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Smart Systems and Social Management (ICSSSM-2 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 262
EP  - 277
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-533-1_18
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-533-1_18
ID  - Choudhury2025
ER  -