Ecomaterial Ambivalence in South and Southeast Asian Literary, Philosophical, and Cultural Narratives (Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment)

This volume provides a timely contribution to the ongoing conversation on the agency of matter in environmental humanities.The first book offering an important and relevant Asian perspective to this hitherto exclusively westcentric exchange, it focuses on one of the influential theoretical fields to emerge in recent years, ‘material ecocriticism,’ which engages with the mind/matter value-dualism.Ecomaterialists have challenged the binary that places ‘mind’ on the active, agentic side while pushing ‘matter’ into inert passivity.This book enters this conversation from the Hindu and Buddhist philosophical perspectives and offers insights from Asian cultural beliefs and faith systems. The concept of panpsychism, as it has recently emerged in astrophysics, and the idea of a Universal Consciousness (Brahman, Nirvana, Tao) in Eastern philosophies, despite their differing approaches and objectives, display interesting overlaps that require further exploration.Parallelly, the idea of an agentic