Analyzing Eco-imperial and Dystopian Concerns in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Postmodern Perspective

Abstract

Postmodern literature demonstrates serious concerns through reflexive conditions of modernity and their impacts on the life in present time’s world. In this regard, postmodern fiction dismantles all established narratives by unveiling the hazards and risks resulted in the course of unchecked race of scientific and industrial progress. In other words, human’s obsession for scientific and technological advancement has resulted into a number of uncontrollable global terrors among which ecological crisis is the most serious debate in postmodern fiction. Ecological crisis seems a global predicament which, on one hand, has attracted the attention of environmentalists, biologists and other scientists, on the other hand, it has also appealed to some of the literary authors. Ecological catastrophes have often been addressed through post-apocalyptic eco-fiction by literary authors. The present research discusses Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in relation to eco-imperial and post-apocalyptic concerns from postmodern perspective. In the select text, Macondo, a utopian place is interrupted by the arrival of gypsies, technologists and capitalists, who transform the town structurally, ecologically and leave it as a ruined dystopian place. The study reflects the concept of reflexive modernity in relation to ecological degradation. The present study has used Alfred Crosby’s theory of eco-imperialism for the analysis of the select text. Moreover, the study has employed Andreas Malm’s the Capitalocene and Timothy Morton’s notions of Hyperobjects and Dark Ecology. The study reveals imperial intervention and capitalist practices as a major cause behind the emergence of ecological crisis leading to apocalypse in the selected texts.