Political Ecology in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

Abstract

The roots of ecology prolong profoundly within earlier phases of history, when the naturalistic fabric was first evinced.  Bringing out his On the Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin not merely engendered a biological culmination but also heralded the revolutionary critical canon of naturalism that was virtually a stone thrown in the vast stagnant lake of traditional literature. Via the naturalistic lens, the whole bulk of man’s behavioral attributes are being expounded in terms of milieu and heredity. The mid-1990s witnessed the publication of The Environmental Imagination by Lawrence Buell in 1995, and The Ecocriticism Reader edited by Cheryll Gloffelty and Harold Fromm in 1996, which palpably underpinned ecocriticism as revolving around the inextricable liaison between literature and the physical environment. The political ecology term was coined to further scrutinize relations among people that pertain to nature. The present paper is an endeavor to pursue the ecological tenor of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s landmark novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and how it was admirably exploited to address precarious postcolonial issues.

Keywords: Political ecology, Marquez, naturalism, ecocriticism, post-colonialism.