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Paper short abstract:

The formally colonized are in a unique position to engage the environmental humanities as they have been bearing the brunt of weather extremes, minerals extractions, and endless ecological catastrophes.

Paper long abstract:

This paper engages with the scholarly discourse of Anthropocene and postcolonialism by looking at the African continent’s unfolding but overlooked and misunderstood environmental issues. The ecological crisis becomes another edition of Africa’s cultural phenomenon of constant mass destruction and a lifetime of suffering. Those sufferings portray an African doomed future. I will critically analyse Idrissou Mora-Kpai’s Arlit, deuxième Paris (2005) and Wanrui Kahiu’s Pumzi (2009) by looking at how African bodies are the best indicators of ecological damage as they live in proximity of an eroding environment. Africans’ day-to-day bearing brunt of ecological catastrophe resembles near-apocalyptic scenarios of living on ‘hell on earth'. Their lived experiences adapt and shape alternative futures.

Using the theoretical discourses of temporality and postcolonialism, this paper will analyse the importance of locality by highlighting an alternative understanding of the Anthropocene from an African perspective. The formally colonized are in a unique position to engage the environmental humanities since the kind of precarity that climate change generates is yet another trying time that postcolonial subjects must overcome. The selected cultural texts provide an in-depth insight into what it means to live on ‘hell on earth’ as contemporary Africanists like Mora-Kpai and Kahiu films are imagining alternative worlds. Thus, it is vital to engage contemporary African expressions of living in the Anthropocene as they can incorporate the meaning and uses of temporal orientation toward a potentially optimistic future that is unique to African lived experiences and aspirations.