A theory conceived by Alfred Crosby (1931—2018) in his 1986 book Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900—1900, which proposes that colonization was not only a form of cultural and political tyranny, it was also a form of environmental terrorism. Indeed, Crosby went so far as to argue that the ecological dimension was in fact primary. His reason for suggesting this was the evident fact that wherever colonists settled they brought with them diseases that devastated the local populations (of both people and plants and animals) as well as invasive pests and weeds that encroached on the existing flora and fauna, and eventually starved them out of existence. European-style agricultural practice utilized in dry regions like Australia and South Africa has had a catastrophic environmental impact. Crosby’s work sparked an enhanced interest in the role and significance of the environment in understanding colonial history in Postcolonial Studies. écriture féminine (feminine writing) Cixous, Hélène coined this term in the widely read essay ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ (The Laugh of Medusa) to describe a kind of writing that is outside of the masculine economy of patriarchal discourse. Cixous envisages écriture féminine as a form of writing that would, in psychoanalyst Lacan, Jacques’s terms, reside or take place in the realm of the real, rather than the symbolic. In psychoanalysis terms it therefore takes the form of the expression of the inexpressible and can only be arrived at via experimentation and play. Interestingly, Cixous’s canonical examples of writers capable of attaining this effect are Shakespeare, Kleist, and Genet. Further Reading: V. Andermatt Conley Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine (1984). I. Blyth and S. Sellers Hélène Cixous: Live Theory (2004).