Unsettling Nature
Ecology, Phenomenology, and the Settler Colonial Imagination
University of Virginia Press | 2022
Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism
“Thoughtful, deeply researched, balanced, and substantive. Eggan’s analysis of the settler colonialist myths of home develops into a profoundly consequential critique of Western humanist culture and European colonial history that should reorient our thinking about our place among other creatures on a threatened planet. The most impressive book of ecocriticism I have read in many years.”
— Louise Westling, University of Oregon, author of The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language
Author Interviews
Click here to read an interview I did with Justin Duyao for the Pacific Northwest College of Art blog.
Click the thumbnail image to listen to a podcast interview about Unsettling Nature I did with Aspen Brown for the Environmental Studies channel on the New Books Network.
“Unsettling Nature grapples with big ideas: imperialism, the history of phenomenology, Freudian psychology, cognition, narrative theory, decolonization, globalization, affect studies, interpretive methodologies, and the material agency of the world in which we live. Yet despite the rigor and depth of Eggan’s analysis his claims are always accessible, rooted in very real histories of place and practice. . . . Eggan’s theorization of ecological realism and exo-phenomenology offers literary critics and environmental humanities scholars essential tools by which to unpack centuries of whitewashed environmental narratives of home and belonging..”
— Erin James, University of Idaho, author of Narrative in the Anthropocene
Book Description
The German poet and mystic Novalis once identified philosophy as a form of homesickness. More than two centuries later, as modernity’s displacements continue to intensify, we feel Novalis’s homesickness more than ever. Yet nowhere has a longing for home flourished more than in contemporary environmental thinking, and particularly in eco-phenomenology. If only we can reestablish our sense of material enmeshment in nature, so the logic goes, we might reverse the degradation we humans have wrought—and in saving the earth we can once again dwell in the nearness of our own being.
Unsettling Nature opens with a meditation on the trouble with such ecological homecoming narratives, which bear a close resemblance to narratives of settler colonial homemaking. Taylor Eggan demonstrates that the Heideggerian strain of eco-phenomenology—along with its well-trod categories of home, dwelling, and world—produces uncanny effects in settler colonial contexts. He reads instances of nature’s defamiliarization not merely as psychological phenomena but also as symptoms of the repressed consciousness of coloniality. The book at once critiques Heidegger’s phenomenology and brings it forward through chapters on Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee. Suggesting that alienation may in fact be "natural" to the human condition and hence something worth embracing instead of repressing, Unsettling Nature concludes with a speculative proposal to transform eco-phenomenology into "exo-phenomenology"—an experiential mode that engages deeply with the alterity of others and with the self as its own Other.