Querying the Ecological Sublime: Colonial Aesthetics, Anticolonial Thought, and the “Double Fracture”

Abstract

This article examines the ecological sublime in its relationship to the history of colonial aesthetics, anticolonial thought, and contemporary colonialism. It argues that, while Edmund Burke utilized the sublime in support of colonialism (including settler colonialism) in North America and colonial slavery, Samson Occom and Ottobah Cugoano developed versions of the sublime to contest British colonialism in the Americas. The history of this aesthetic contestation has not been represented in scholarship on the ecological sublime, which, this article shows, has a vexed relationship with historical and contemporary colonialism. The article argues that the ecological sublime exhibits the “double fracture” of modernity in its inadequate handling of the history of colonialism and environmentalism. It concludes by evaluating the potential of the ecological sublime for anticolonial uses by Indigenous and Black thinkers.