This panel seeks to explore ecocriticism in African Literature and evaluate the position of African ecocritics. It will evaluate convergences and divergences in theoretical and methodological views from African and African diaspora ecocritics, environmentally conscious authors and critics.
Long Abstract:
Africa's relationship with the rest of the world - Europe and America especially, has been one of struggles between predator and prey, exploiter and exploited, with the African environment as battle ground. On the other hand, global attention has, in this 21st century been increasingly focused on the best options for humanity's enjoyment of the preponderant gains of advancements in science and technology, while at the same time reducing, to the barest, human actions that create pollution, climate and biodiversity crises. To the global West, whose authors and critics are at the forefront of environmental criticism and advocacy, this seems logical. However, environmental criticism and advocacy from the largely underdeveloped countries of the Global South apparently contradicts those of the industrialised West, as theoretical and methodological stances from the two blocs reveal. Leveraging on extant body of environmental literature and criticisms from Africa, and Africa diaspora, this panel seeks to explore ecocriticism in African Literature - past, present, and future. It will evaluate, from a postcolonial viewpoint, the position of African ecocritics. It will evaluate what critics have been up to, since the turn of the twenty-first century, when the first paper on ecocriticism by an African, appeared in an international journal, on the subject of literature and environment. It will evaluate convergences and divergences in the theoretical and methodological views from various African and African diaspora ecocritics, environmentally conscious authors - poets, playwrights/dramatists, novelists, writers of short stories, and critics, in African literature of the 20th and 21st centuries.
This paper looks at recent African short fiction and their engagement with environmental disruption. The paper explores the entanglements of colonial extraction, resource exploitation, and ecological collapse in four short stories and their imaginings of futures after the end of the (human) world.
Paper long abstract:
The call for the African Short Story Day collection with the theme Disruption was closed before the world (and the publication of the anthology) came to a halt due to the outbreak of a deadly zoonotic virus. In this uncanny premonition of a disruptive future and soon-to-be-present, the selected African writers provide visionary contributions to the field of short fiction, environmental literature, and speculative fiction. This paper looks at four short stories published in this anthology in 2021. The four short stories engage with environmental disruption and explore futures born out of contemporary ecological degradation, colonial extraction, and racial capitalism. Nadia Ahidjo’s “Before the Rains Came,” “Static” by Alithnayn Abdulkareem, “Laatlammer” by Julia Louw, and “Before We Die Unwritten” by Innocent Ilo deal in distinct ways with gross environmental destruction, unabating resource exploitation, and total climate collapse and gauge what remains of the present in their imaginings of futures after the end of the (human) world. These short stories express rigorous urgency and agency in navigating over-abundance and scarcity, means of (non-)survival, and new and old social orders in the aftermath of environmental disaster. Moreover, by merging pressing ecological concerns with Afrofuturist elements, these short stories contemplate what was, what is, and what may be from a postcolonial Afrocentric point of view and offer new symbioses between literature and environmental consciousness. By exploring the prescient entanglements of climate crisis, ecological collapse, and Afrofuturism in contemporary African short fiction, this paper aims at contributing to the growing research on African ecocriticism.
This paper seeks to examine Bridget Pitt’s response, in Eye Brother Horn (2022), to the problems of the postcolony – and of the ‘Plantationocene’ (Haraway’s 2015/2019 adjunct to the ‘anthropocene’) – by reanimating the past, seeing the present afresh, and reimagining the future.
Paper long abstract:
Eye Brother Horn (2022), Bridget Pitt’s novel set in 19th century colonial Natal (Zululand), is the story of “kin-making” (Haraway 2016) across the boundaries of species, race, and culture. Through the brothers, Daniel and Moses – sons of an English Reverend at a Christian mission station – Pitt shows the convergence of seemingly opposing ontologies: Daniel, the biological son, has a mystical connection with the natural world, rejecting patriarchal, colonial culture. He is emotionally sensitive and spiritually curious, while Moses, the adopted Zulu son, is more pragmatic; fascinated with science. The divide between the worlds they straddle becomes increasingly more apparent: a traditional African existence, sympathetic with the environment, and the modern emphasis of change and ‘progress’ that is being imposed by the colonising force. Eye Brother Horn provides “activated storytelling” (Haraway 2016:132); a timeous examination of the effects of colonisation on people and the environment: Pitt foregrounds a correspondence between western Wordsworthian ontology and African animism. “Literature does not explain or second scientific and philosophical notions; it poses a fundamental challenge to any form of knowledge” (Bartosch 2013:12). This paper seeks to examine Pitt’s response to the problems of the postcolony – and of the ‘Plantationocene’ (Haraway’s 2015/2019 adjunct to the ‘anthropocene’) – by reanimating the past, seeing the present afresh, and reimagining the future. The novel transcends present polarisations by reintroducing (for contemporary readers) the mythologies of once-colonised spaces; enabling a reimagination of multi-species possibilities for the future.
The paper illustrates and critically analyses some of the challenges facing Nigerian creative writers in the twenty- first century with the example of Adamu Kyuka Usman's novel Death of Eternity using Eco- Criticism / Environmentalism. to arrive at a conclusion.
Paper long abstract:
The Nigerian Writer and the Challenges of the Twenty-First Century: An Appraisal of the Challenges of the Nigerian Writer and the Eco-Critical Dimensions of Adamu Kyuka Usman's Death of EternityAbstractThe purpose of this paper is to appraise and critically analyse the challenges facing the Nigerian writer in the 21st century with particular emphasis on the Eco -Critical dimensions of Adamu Kyuka Usman's novel Death of Eternity using the tenets of Eco-Criticism / Environmentalism. The objectives of the paper are to identify the writer particularly the Northern Nigerian writer, examine the major challenges and problems faced in the 21st century. The position of the paper is that the Nigerian writer in general and the northern Nigerian in particular, despite the challenges has started shifting paradigmatically, from the fixation with culture and tradition to a concern with modernist themes and motifs and new direction in creativity and artistic praxis.
Scholars have argued for African Ecocriticism that explores imaginative texts, and nature. This paper upholds African Ecocriticism also described as African Environmentalism drawing from a multiplicity of voices where the environment for the African is valued as sacred and not labeled the ‘other’.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses the notion of African Ecocriticism which can as well be expressed as African Environmentalism drawing from Nigeria’s Niyi Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth (1986), Kenyan- Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed: A Memoir (2006), and South Africa- Zake Mda’s Heart of Redness (2006). Over time, African people have demonstrated a deep environmental sensibility that has created customs, songs, proverbs, myths, and taboos which can be observed in each community for harmonious living. Thus, in African environmentalism, the environment is esteemed as sacred and not categorized as ‘other’ as signified among industrialists, and supporters rather, it is a vital part of the African cultural world equilibrium. By so doing, African Ecocriticism circumscribes the extent to which African writers represent environmentalism in the contexts of African environments by focusing on African literary aesthetics and ecological wisdom. Also, African Ecocriticism opens up how the destructive upshot of resource exploitation, dispossession, and toxicity injure the precarious bionetwork of the impoverished African communities and their sources of existence. This paper explicates that African environmental consciousness responds to contemporary representations of eco-crisis through environmentally unequal practices under the lure of progress which marginalize African people and spaces. Appraising African environmentalism in the select works raises fundamental questions about African literature past, present, and future using distinct African environmental motifs and tropes. With the growing awareness of environmental issues in the twenty-first century, this paper brings to the fore the ways African eco-consciousness contributes to environmentalism and conservation amid the benefits, and craze for technological advancement.
The issue of African poets/writers contributing to global environmental justice through literary expressions is not new. Poems in aid of environmental activism will be in focus. The broad question would be framed as, ‘should African Poets bother writing beautiful lines about environmental issues?’
Paper long abstract:
Any discerning reader cannot miss the urgency in Niyi Osundare’s words. What can be missed and is missing however is the usual debate about the effectiveness of environmental themes in poems written by Africans.
“In literature, ecology illustrates the relation between nature and human nature. In ecological writing, nature has been granted the status of the great Mother by indigenous communities. Literature and nature are interlinked; nature is the outer world often portrayed in literature”(Aswin Prasanth, June 2016). To write creatively about nature means to possess an uncommon ability to reflect on how humanity constantly affects nature and how nature conditions humanity. On that premise Prasanth (ibid) states further “African writers are in a “state of nature,” in perfect harmony with environment. Their literature has therefore a rural orientation on the one hand, and despise of urban background on the other. There is an inherent longing for lost rustic serenity in African literatures.” No wonder one of the African bards identifies himself as “Farmer-Born, Peasant-bred.”
In this presentation, poems in aid of environmental activism will be in focus. The broad question would be framed as, ‘should African Poets bother writing beautiful lines about environmental issues?’
The inherited rift between art and science is a threat to a sustainable future of environmentalism in African literature. This paper advocates for a shift of emphasis, from the archives, to experiential encounters with nature; for a regime of getaways into the real world that literature recreates.
Paper long abstract:
Ecocriticism's interdisciplinary stance is apparently defeated in African literature by an inherited rift between art and science. Literature students and teachers appraise the environment from archived sources, but lack the tool for empirically validating these sources, for significantly impacting the real world with their knowledge. Chinua Achebe's novels, for instance, have been studied by generations of literary scholars in Nigeria and beyond. Many of these studies have centred on Achebe's representation of nature and the natural environment. Other studies have engaged more recent and environmentally activist writings, like Tanure Ojaide's The Activist, Isidore Okpewho's Tides, and Kaine Agary's Yellow-Yellow, as testaments of some negative consequences of anthropogenic influences on nature. These studies enrich the archives. But, beyond the archives, there seems to be nothing more that literature could do to influence policy towards mitigating glaring destitution of the physical environment, which is often within literature's practitioners' area of influence. This paper, following some suggested environmental imagination praxis, investigates two characters: Unoka, in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Umar-Faruq, in Aliyu Kamal's Fire in my Backyard, as embodiments, respectively of archived, and experimental ecological consciousness. It appraises, in the former text, the practice of rehashing archived knowledge, and the potentials, in the latter, of experiential encounters with nature, in literature. The study concludes that the future of environmentalism in African literature is bleak without a regime of getaways, from the archives, into the real world.
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