The environment in fiction is often discussed as a backdrop or "setting" that complements or reinforces characterization. This seminar will instead foreground this traditional background to explore it not as mere backdrop confirming the work of narrative but as the narrative. We will consider the work it performs in various literary or nonliterary works from the Caribbean in its narrativization and construction. After all, there is no more colonized and hybridized space than the Caribbean islands where the fears associated with invasive species and the resulting risks to ecological diversity are at their highest? What ideological work does the environment (natural, nonhuman or urban) perform in Caribbean texts that nonetheless choose to represent nature in Edenic ways? In what ways is this representation helpful as a consciousness raising mechanism at a time when climate change is one of our top concerns as a species? Alternatively, is the representation of the environment obfuscating issues that should be more salient?  If so, how? Rather than look outward to the ways in which textual representation portrays the actual environment, this session therefore asks how the fiction impacts our understanding of a reality it may not be as faithful to as it first appears.