Devastative Naturescapes and Superhuman Saviors: Analyzing Postcolonial Ecological Crises in Contemporary Times with a reference to Kornei Chukovksy’s Doctor Powderpill

Abstract

The European colonizers treated the natural environment, the wild lives, and the plant lives in the Global South as insurmountable, wild and redundant. Ample of literary, historical and anthropological records from the colonial era reveal how the naturescapes in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the Global South have been perceived as ‘wild, dark and uncivilized’ because the Europeans encountered a lot of challenges in taming, pruning, shaping, and reconfiguring the natural environment according to their whims and fancies. With the passage of time, such problematic narratives have systemically, epistemically, ontologically, and ideologically trickled down from one generation to another in the forms of folk tales, children’s tales, poetries, short stories, novels and various other forms of narratives. This article uses Russian poet Kornei Chukovsky’s poem Doctor Powderpill as a reference point. Through attempting a postcolonial critique of the poem, the article unfolds the possible ‘ecological postcolonialscapes,’ which can be implemented to re-read and reinterpret the existing histories, cultures, literatures, and societies around us in a ‘trans-habitual’ existential way.