Though ecocriticism and ecofeminism have been appropriated by postmodernism, they resist postmodern and poststructuralist ideas that everything is sign and that there is nothing called natural. This reduction of nature into sign, and meaning into a linguistic deadlock called `aporia', which postmodernism does, not only poses imaginary problems as real, but also spells ideational death for nature. While offering an ecological critique of postmodernism, the essay uses the term `postmodernism' both as a condition that announced the death of the subject, and also its poststructuralist manifestations in literary theory. This is illustrated by textual examples from native-American and other eco-conscious literatures, which defy the textualization of the universe and nature. Ecology, the essay seeks to argue, posits an alternative way of recording that reveals the being of the other rather than its elision. Native texts, in contrast to postmodern polarization, are about interrelationships and interdependence. These texts see the lack of communication between human and nonhuman, as a problem of human langue and suggest alternative ways to understand and appreciate nature. The essay also draws upon the insights of `thing theory' and argues that things have a life of their own and that they exist autonomous of human perception.

Departments of English Studies obsessed with theory, in India, as elsewhere in other parts of the world, have been facing an urgent need to redefine every reality in terms of social constructionism. Not surprisingly nature, `out there' as they mockingly say, has been transformed to a site of social and cultural definitions. Nature and ecology, as we knew them earlier, have virtually died and become theoretically loaded terms; objects of conference room discussions rather than the `beyond' of it. The problem arises when ecotheorists themselves welcome such interpretation, and while championing the cause of ecology subordinate it to various theoretical frameworks (broadly under postmodernism), which essentially devalue the `real' and ecology.

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