Ecokritike
volume: 1, no: 1
year: 2024,
pp. 1-15
© Ecokritike 2024 1
Devastative Naturescapes and Superhuman Saviors: Analyzing Postcolonial Ecological Crises
in Contemporary Times with a reference to Kornei Chukovksy’s Doctor Powderpill
Sayan Dey
1
Abstract. The European colonizers treated the natural environment, the wild lives, and the plant
lives in the Global South as insurmountable, wild and redundant. Ample of literary, historical and
anthropological records from the colonial era reveal how the naturescapes in Africa, Asia, and
other parts of the Global South have been perceived as ‘wild, dark and uncivilized’ because the
Europeans encountered a lot of challenges in taming, pruning, shaping, and reconfiguring the
natural environment according to their whims and fancies. With the passage of time, such
problematic narratives have systemically, epistemically, ontologically, and ideologically trickled
down from one generation to another in the forms of folk tales, children’s tales, poetries, short
stories, novels and various other forms of narratives. This article uses Russian poet Kornei
Chukovsky’s poem Doctor Powderpill as a reference point. Through attempting a postcolonial
critique of the poem, the article unfolds the possible ‘ecological postcolonialscapes,’ which can be
implemented to re-read and reinterpret the existing histories, cultures, literatures, and societies
around us in a ‘trans-habitual’ existential way.
Keywords: naturescapes, ecological postcolonialscapes, postcolonial, trans-habitual,
superhuman.
Reworlding: Towards a Human Collapse
Isn’t the world that we currently live in need to reworld? An important aspect of reworlding is
cross-existence. So, it is also important to ask: Do humans exist on their individual terms or they
have always been cross-existing with other living species? These questions, in relation to the poem
titled Doctor Powderpill by Russian poet Kornei Chukovsky, serve as the foundation of this article
because, through the character Doctor Powderpill, the poet makes a consistent effort to argue how
humans are capable of surviving on their own and no other living species like plants, animals,
insects, and other can survive without the humans. It is also important to clarify that the arguments
in this article are not restricted to the poem. The poem has been used here as a referential point to
1
Assistant Professor, Department of Language and Literature, Alliance University, Bangalore, India.
Email: sayan.dey@alliance.edu.in