Postcolonial ecocriticism and the cultural politics of nature in Belize

This dissertation argues for and elaborates a postcolonial ecocriticism that reads texts as embedded in systems at once social and natural, discursive and material. It models this mode of analysis through an explication of the cultural politics of nature in contemporary Belize, a small country on the margins of global capitalism but increasingly drawn into the tourist itineraries and environmentalist ambitions of many in the global North. I analyze contemporary Belize as a site upon and through which different ideas of nature---and of the place of (different groups of) humans in relation to nature---intersect, compete, and combine. After a theoretical and disciplinary discussion of the difficulties and potentialities of conjoining postcolonial and ecocritical forms of analyses, I explore how the complex social and environmental histories of logging, land monopolization, underdevelopment, and waves of immigration ironically made possible Belize's appearance in 1980s and 90s as a paradise of timeless nature. Nature emerged in these decades as a new kind of political object in Belize, alongside and through the industry and discourses of ecotourism, which draw upon centuries-old tropes from European colonial discourses about the American tropics. The spectacular nature of ecotourism discourses contrasts sharply with a variety of natures found in Belizean literary texts, from the mosquito-ridden swamps of nineteenth-century comic poems to the mundane grounds of a burgeoning national identity in Zee Edgell's 1982 novel Beka Lamb. My goal is to read texts ranging from advertisements and popular travel journalism to poetry and novels for both their political subtexts and their figurations of nature, and particularly for how nature and politics are totally intertwined---produced in and through one another---in particular ways in the aftermath of European colonialism.