Revisiting Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” through the Lens of Post-Colonial Ecocriticism

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to break away from the canonical reading of George Orwell’s most celebrated essay “Shooting an Elephant” and analyze it from the perspective of post-colonial ecocriticism. Ever since its publication, “Shooting an Elephant” has been viewed as a literary work that depicts the disturbing nature of imperialism and the impacts of its byproducts both on the colonized and the colonizer. This paper postulates that employing such an anthropocentric view while reading a text that projects the predicament of an animal and the exploitation of nature can be an intellectual misjudgment. The symbiosis of post-colonialism and ecocriticism ensures a synergy that is essential for contemporary literary criticism.The project of post-colonial ecocriticism is to re-read the canonical texts common to both fields and trace out ecocritical concerns in postcolonial literature and postcolonial aspects of environmental writing. In this paper, the ideas of post-colonialism in “Shooting an Elephant” have been addressed while keeping the environmental concerns into consideration.

Keywords

• post-colonial ecocriticism
• imperialism
• anthropocentric