Revisiting Myths and Confronting the Colonial-imperial Power: A Paradigm of Eco-politics and beyond

Abstract

This article explores how revisiting mythical narratives offer a subversive outlook to nature, and how the portrayal of human-nature relationship finds a strong alignment with ecocritical studies. It brings in some ecocritical concerns, i.e., critiques on anthropocentrism and nature-human binaries and critical projections of different natural degradations as presented in three myths, in underpinning the portrayal of women, war, nature, and  natural phenomena in three mythological tales. In doing so, it concentrates on the myths of Ragnarok, Erysichthon and the adaptation of Greek myth  in Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon (458 BCE). In light of the myths of Agamemnon and Erysichthon, the study intends to trace the integration of postcolonial conceptualisations of power with theo-critical lenses of eco-criticism and eco-feminism. In summary terms, all of these three theories envision a symmetry between social justice and environmental justice. In doing so, they strongly contest the European mythical anthropocene that comes to cause damage to all women, nonhuman beings and nature. Thus, as the paper examines, they critique every form of anthropocentric domination that is backed up by a binary politics, severing humankind from humankind itself, humankind from non-humankind and is cemented by the western imperial ideology of power, gender, femininity, development and technical-technological and economic advancements.