Chapter 4 - Uprooting Empire: Jean Rhys and Unrest in Imperial Centers

Summary

Instead of pastoral retreat, it is only through confrontation with the political powers sustaining human environments that recovery may begin to take place. For the United Kingdom this meant coming to terms with its increasingly unsustainable empire. In Chapter 4, “Uprooting Empire,” I explore how Jean Rhys presents the failures of interwar recovery in Europe, the failure to find rest and the return to war, as an environmental justice issue stemming from the continued colonial subjection of foreign lands. Tracing the colonial history of Rhys’s homeland Dominica in her 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight, I argue that protagonist Sasha Jansen’s inability to rest points to larger geopolitical inequalities that continue to deny large portions of the global population the ability to generate meaningful change. The chapter traces how the field of ecology arose through explicit ties to imperial projects of territory control and resource management. I challenge uncritical visions of the “ecological” as inherently benevolent or just, and pursue instead an understanding of ecology as fragile and subject to violent and exploitative power relations.