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Article ID: CBB733141314

Ecologies of cotton (2020)

Banerjee, Sukanya (Author)

Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Volume: 42
Issue: 5
Pages: 493-507
Publication date: 2020

URI: https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2020.1816089

DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2020.1816089

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Imperialism Ecology Literature Industrialization Trade Cotton and cotton industry 19th century

By focusing on the nineteenth-century cotton trade, this essay examines how the circumstances affecting the cultivation of the cotton plant and consequently its manufacture into yarn and cloth – the ecologies of cotton, in short – variously inform literary and cultural texts that have hitherto been read as discrete and disconnected. Analyzing aspects of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and a poem/song by the late nineteenth-early twentieth-century Bengali poet-songwriter, Mukunda Das, the essay situates British industrial fiction alongside the literary and cultural production of the Indian swadeshi movement, which by the turn of the twentieth century, rejected the use of industrially-manufactured British products, particularly cotton textiles. In reading these texts alongside each other, the essay considers the importance of a denotative reading practice to ecocriticism. As the essay argues, twinning an ecological reading practice with one that is denotative is critical for several reasons, not least of which is that such a reading lays bare the transimperial nodes of labor and resource expropriation, the contingencies and specificities of which also significantly reconfigure our literary maps.

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