Tag Archives: Difference

An Ecocritical Reading of Blood Meridian and Strange as This Weather Has Been

This article provides a postcolonial ecocritical perspective on modern American novels by relating and examining aspects of ecological and human violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: The Evening Redness in the West (1985) and Anne Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been (2007). While McCarthy represents examples of ethnic and racial violence and Pancake focuses on class violence, the two novelists articulate a particular awareness of the interconnections between economic and political hierarchies and different forms of ecological and human violence in different American contexts. The two novels, then, denounce the deterministic, colonial constructions of economy, power, and knowledge in modern societies on the one hand and the validation of antagonism and violence against otherness and difference on the other. Specifically examining daily experiences, psychological-mental challenges, and changes of the fifteen-years-old female teenager, Bant, in Strange as This Weather Has Been and the male teenager, the kid, in Blood Meridian, I will show how specific individuals and groups deconstruct deterministic, colonial constructions of patriarchy and violence through their ecological awareness. My analysis exposes that colonizing and colonized countries still suffer from discrepancies and contradictions of colonial culture and modern politics and ultimately reveals the limitations of white Americans’ freedom and equality within colonial and national frameworks. 

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