LITERATURE AND ENVIRONMENT: AN ECO-CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE OF TRESPASSING BY UZMA ASLAM KHAN AND BURNT SHADOWS BY KAMILA SHAMSI

Abstract

This research explores Kanila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) alongside Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing (2003) using the concepts of ecocriticism, as centered on the ways both novels civilize the worth of the environment and the consequences on its moral judgment. The researcher also analyzes the ways ethical and historical commentary and mental images of the environment crafted in Pakistani English fiction. Within the domestic and local contexts, Khan’s Trespassing exemplifies an environmental consciousness, treating droughts, barren and dry fields, and filthy rivers as metaphors for a disengaged society and the muted social and systematic discrimination against women. Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, on the other hand, deepens the geopolitical and historical extension of ecodiscourse, merging the post 9/11 world and the atomic devastation of Japan through an ‘ecology of trauma.’ Although Khan and Shamsie’s scales of focus differ, intimate and regional in contrast to Shamsie’s transnational and temporal, both writers regard the environment as a sentient witness to human transgressions. Their narratives turn the environment into human moral and historical loss, asserting the nexus of the environmental and ethical-political crisis. The research affirms the novels’ position in the Global South, as both enhance the The Environmental Humanities of the South by turnin' ecobiography into a form of cultural and normative remembrance. The literature of Khan and Shamsie emphasizes the relevance of the human-non human world interface through disparate yet unifying eco-critical perspectives.