Climate Catastrophe and Postcolonial Ecologies in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction

This study employs a postcolonial ecocritical framework, drawing upon Rob Nixon’s concept of "slow violence," Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s theorization of island ecologies, and Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation. Through close textual analysis, comparative literary criticism and the creation and adoption of postcolonial Caribbean Ecologies literary analysis framework, the article investigates how contemporary Anglophone Caribbean writers articulate environmental degradation, resource extraction, and climatic vulnerability alongside colonial historical trajectories. The primary text corpus comprises Diana McCaulay’s novel Dog-Heart (2010), Sharon Millar’s title story from The Whale House and Other Stories (2015), and Monique Roffey’s novel The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020). The analysis demonstrates that contemporary Caribbean fiction disrupts Eurocentric, apocalyptic climate narratives by framing ecological crises as continuous with plantation legacies and extractive imperialism. McCaulay exposes urban environmental injustice and socio-ecological toxicity in Kingston’s informal settlements; Millar critiques coastal extractivism and marine commodification through bodily and ecological trauma; and Roffey deploys indigenous mythology to foreground human-nonhuman relationality and resist neo-colonial ecocide. Together, these texts re-conceptualize Caribbean environments not as passive backdrops to catastrophe, but as active sites of postcolonial ecological resistance and relational survival.