Paper short abstract:

“Nature” & “environment” are not universal concepts, Ramachandra Guha warned in 1989. Neither are ecocriticism and écopoétique. This paper asks: what does this statement mean for a researcher or an author in Nigeria, the United States, France, or the Ivory Coast? Definitely, always something else.

Paper long abstract:

Ecocriticism or écopoétique means something different depending on whether we are based at a university in Nigeria, the United States, France, or the Ivory Coast; the language and the region of the world influencing both the method and the corpus. The aim of this paper is first to survey what ecocriticism/écopoétique means in English, in French, and in specifically how it is understood in West Africa. Second, it is about participating in the collective effort to challenge the chronology presenting Anglo-American ecocriticism as “the origin” of literary criticism of environmental perspectives. As Tanure Ojaide (Okuyade, vii) wrote: “There has been some form of eco-criticism in African scholarship long before it became vogue in the Western academy”. Finally, in order to engage with a postcolonial, West African construction of the environment, the importance of considering West African literary and scholars’ works – including the ones only published in West Africa – and the need to recognize “new kinds of environmental discourses” (Caminero-Santangelo and Myers), will be discussed.