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Toward an African Ecocriticism: Postcolonialism, Ecology and Life & Times of Michael K
Abstract
Recent articles have called for postcolonial and ecology-minded criticism to engage with each other, suggesting, too, some of the points of difficulty they might encounter when they do. One point of difficulty lies in how these two forms of criticism develop differing evaluations of discourse and its relation to what counts as real. This essay proposes resolving this difficulty with a materialist apprehension of discourse and suggests that a postcolonial ecocriticism enacted this way might have value generally for African studies. The essay then examines J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K, a novel that has been explored as exemplar of postcolonial ecological thinking, and argues that while Michael K may indeed be shaped by attitudes typical of postcolonial thinking at its inception, it is not a novel with much interest in ecology. The issue for an African ecocriticism, then, is how to grasp the novel's writing of nature. I argue that its historical juncture provides an interpretive context for how the novel subordinates its writing of nature to its postcolonial suspicion of the modern nation state.
... The commitment to environmental issues by Niger-Delta poets has evolved as a result of a host of socio-economic, political and historical experiences. Anthony Vital (2008) acknowledges this when he asserts that African eco-criticism, which also entails environmental commitment, will need to work from an understanding of the complexity of African pasts, taking into account the variety in African responses to currents of modernity that reached Africa from Europe initially, but that now influence Africa from multi-centres, European, American, and now Asian, in the present form of the globalizing economy (p.87-88). He adds that it will require being rooted in local (regional, national) concerns for social life and its natural environment if it is to pose African questions and find African answers. ...
Niger-Delta poetry, since its inception, has been noted for tackling issues about the environment and the people that live in it. Such issues include environmental degradation, marginalisation and injustice stemming from the exploration of crude oil without commensurate recompense for the Niger-Delta environment and her people. This study, therefore, attempts to examine how Nnimmo Bassey, ’Ruvia Idase, Chukwuma Anyanwu, Greene Okome, and Martins Tugbokorowei have been able to engage their art in advocacy for earth’s safety and preservation.This study adopts the second-wave Eco-critical theoretical standpoint which particularly argues that injustices to the environment and the marginalization of the people of the region should be exposed. The poems examined in the study are vocal in exposing the ruined environment of the Niger-Delta region and also aim at reawakening the people’s sense of responsibility towards the need to protect, preserve and redeem the once serene environment.
... Through domination and subjugation, Crusoe transforms the island into a colony and claims ownership of everything and everyone. He has created a kingdom (Vital, 2008). Crusoe's civilizing mission in an isolated island is a process of establishing his self-image as a superior being, intelligent and resourceful even in the worst of the most impossible situations. ...
... Informed by the necessity of biodiversity for the sustainability of reproductive life, When Rain Clouds Gather, moreover, offers a productive ground for investigating how women's traditional reproductive and productive livelihoods have been disrupted by the collusion of traditional patriarchy and modern scientific patriarchal projects. It is at this juncture of Botswana's immersion into a globalizing modernity that demands an African ecofeminist perspective rooted in concerns for Tswana society, culture, and its ecosystems (Camineo-Santangelo, 2007; Lionnet, 2000;Lederer, 2014;Murphy 2013;Nixon, 2011;Vital, 2008;Wangari, 2003Wangari, , 2006Wangari, , 2009). Head's literary place based narrative creates an interdisciplinary space for probing the "slow violence" of ecological apartheid. ...
Bessie Head’s first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather, is perhaps one of her most ethico-political narratives to examine the introduction of modern capitalism and patriarchal science against the haunting spectral of traditional tribal systems in pre-Independence Botswana. Set in Golema Mmidi, which ironically translates to “grow crops,” Head provides a detailed historical trajectory of how the imposition of agribusiness development projects onto traditional pastoral livelihoods devoured traditional tribal structures and ecosystems. In this essay, I examine how the implementation of modernized agricultural technology supplanted the collective relationship of subsistence farming, kinship systems, and cattle herding. I argue that When Rain Clouds Gather offers an interdisciplinary space for probing ecologies of pain in which scientific agribusiness projects have violently separated humanity from nature and rendered 63 percent of the Botswana’s population food insecure.
... Michael's atavistic yearning for staying close to earth and nature, according to Anthony Vital (2008), enables Michael to savor a "full sense of being" (96). This is the freedom which is obtained by escaping the oppression of modern institutions. ...
The perplexing silence of Michael K continues to baffle readers. It is often argued that Michael's rejection of food and his infatuation with gardening are interpretable as forms of resistance defying absorption into prevailing discourses. My argument here will follow the same line of reasoning but I will be using a different route. In the first part of this paper, I will focus on Michael's ambivalence. In the second part, I will discuss the problematic of ambivalence in light of two conceptions of ethics and morality represented by modern and postmodern perspectives. The main difference between them, according to Zygmunt Bauman, revolves around their acceptance and rejection of ambivalence. I will argue that the conflict between modern and postmodern viewpoints ends in a crisis reflected in the medical officer's obsessional thoughts about Michael. The situation is compounded by Michael's nonsensical unresponsiveness which problematizes the relationship between the care-giver and the care-receiver. My argument would deal with the nature of this challenge and its implications for the moral self which I believe result in a moral crisis symbolically depicted as the reversal of positions between Michael as the care-receiver and the medical officer as the care-giver. This final section of my paper would be premised on the term 'hostage' borrowed from Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of ethics.
... Conversely, Moe (2011) observed that in American societies the sense of ecophobia and ecophilia e love of nature e exist side by side. Some commentators have explored the inherent ecophilia and ecophobia in some of Africa's award-winning novels, including Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (Barau, 2008) and J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K (Vital, 2008). ...
The current study underscores the importance of environmental ethics as a vehicle for engaging society, businesses, and policy-makers towards mainstreaming transformation to sustainability. This reflects an innovative trend towards using narratives in social and management sciences, which needs to be replicated by other disciplines, organisations, agencies, and social groupings. In this paper, focus is on identifying storylines, phrases, myths, and local and indigenous knowledge systems of ethical and ecological significance. Using examples from written and unwritten narratives of Hausa - one of the widely spoken languages in sub-Saharan Africa, this study shines light on some key narratives relevant to present day critical environmental issues such as management of agricultural landscapes, municipal waste, ecosystem services, integrated natural resource management, and biodiversity loss. Environmental ethics drawn from the narratives provide an integrated platform where formal and informal institutions of sustainability can be strengthened, supporting transformation towards sustainability through enhancing ecological consciousness, skills, and attitudes.
... Postcolonial Ecologies through the work of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. See also Huggan (2004), Nixon (200520lla), Vital andErney (2006-2007), Cilano and DeLoughrey (2007), Huggan and Tiffin (2007;, Wright (2010), Roos and Hunt (2010), Carrigan (20llb), and Deckard (2012). While these works sought to bring the two fields in dialogue, other authors have turned to literature with a more regional approach. ...
This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental Humanities, focusing in particular on how the history of globalization and imperialism represents a special challenge to the representation of environmental issues. Essays in this path-breaking collection examine the role that narrative, visual, and aesthetic forms can play in drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about long-term and catastrophic environmental challenges such as climate change, militarism, deforestation, the pollution and management of the global commons, petrocapitalism, and the commodification of nature. The volume presents a postcolonial approach to the environmental humanities, especially in conjunction with current thinking in areas such as political ecology and environmental justice. Spanning regions such as Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Australasia and the Pacific, as well as North America, the volume includes essays by founding figures in the field as well as new scholars, providing vital new interdisciplinary perspectives on: the politics of the earth; disaster, vulnerability, and resilience; political ecologies and environmental justice; world ecologies; and the Anthropocene. In engaging critical ecologies, the volume poses a postcolonial environmental humanities for the twenty-first century. At the heart of this is a conviction that a thoroughly global, postcolonial, and comparative approach is essential to defining the emergent field of the environmental humanities, and that this field has much to offer in understanding critical issues surrounding the creation of alternative ecological futures.
... Postcolonial Ecologies through the work of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. See also Huggan (2004), Nixon (200520lla), Vital andErney (2006-2007), Cilano and DeLoughrey (2007), Huggan and Tiffin (2007;, Wright (2010), Roos and Hunt (2010), Carrigan (20llb), and Deckard (2012). While these works sought to bring the two fields in dialogue, other authors have turned to literature with a more regional approach. ...
... Gordimer's model of interpretation is not the only inadequate one. Critics who argue for an engagement between postcolonial thinking and ecology like Anthony Vital (2008) tend to subordinate the novel's ecology to a "postcolonial suspicion of the nation state" and thus argue for "a materialist apprehension of discourse" (p.87). Vital therefore supports "postcolonial ecocriticism" (p.91), thus privileging the novel's postcolonial logic over its ecocriticism. ...
This paper argues that J. M. Coetzee's 1983 novel Life and Times of Michael K is informed by a rich and early ecological vision that has not been adequately considered so far. It argues that Coetzee demonstrates an interest in all living organisms and pays attention to their environ-ment and interaction. It is argued that Coetzee's ethico-political vision is not limited to humans and that minor forms of life like plants and animals are as signifi cant as human life on earth. The result is that the "non-human other" is never ignored in Coetzee, which testifi es to the importance of a broad philosophical vision that acknowl-edges rather than subsumes difference. This paper, hence, makes a connection between Coetzee's ecological vision and his ethicopolitical attention to otherness. The result is what we can call Coetzee's "ecological postcolonial-ism." In addition, our argument explores and defends an often underplayed theme in Coetzee's fi ction, namely that of gardening. While some recent Coetzee scholarship has acknowledged the significant presence of animals in his fiction, that of vegetation remains by far underplayed. In Coetzee's vision, plants and landscapes are unduly ignored and exploited in times of political strife, which accounts for Coetzee's ecocritical—and by implication political—relevance. In other words, Coetzee's ecological vision—we seek to prove—is still richly political as an in-veigh against various forms of injustice, including but not limited to apartheid.
... Some newspaper analyses have been done (Barnett 2003;Lawhon and Fincham 2006), but the newspapers selected cater towards the elite. Similarly, the environmental views expressed in J.M. Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K have been the subject of literary review (Vital 2008), but the myriad works by more popular South African authors (including non-white ones still living in South Africa) remain unexamined. ...
There has long been a notable difference between the environmentalism of the global North and South. Despite this and recent calls for the development of theory from the global South, research on environmentalism in the global South continues to largely employ Northern theory. While much of this seeks to inform and revise theory, and a case has been made for the articulation of an environmentalism of the poor, work in the South remains dominated by framings and questions articulated in the North. In this paper, I examine geographical research to make a case for also articulating situated environmentalisms which move beyond the generalization of Southern environmentalism to investigate how the environment is understood in specific contexts. Such environmentalisms should not be seen as developed in isolation but are recognized as products of intra‐ and international networked engagements. I explore this argument through the case of geographical research in South Africa. My review of the literature suggests that work in South Africa largely speaks to international environmental discourses and environmental management and governance theories. While this research productively engages with global academia and environmentalisms, it overlooks many significant questions and how the local context matters. I argue that this is not simply a case of South African exceptionalism, but instead, that there is a need to more broadly consider situated, networked environmentalism in both the global North and South.
Ecological concerns demand recognition at this point of the Anthropocene epoch. There is a grave threat that European imperialism has caused what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow-violence’ to the environment. Kai Cheng Thom’s, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir (2016) is a work that intermingles elements of magical realism, ecocriticism, trans literature and postcolonialism. Using Postcolonial Ecocriticism as a critical lens, this paper aims to uncover the link between colonization and the ecological crises. The use of magical realism as a literary technique is analyzed to highlight the ways in which this tool helps transgress rigid binaries. The paper attempts to point out the impact of colonization in erasing cultures, communities and biodiversity in order to find a better way forward.
Regardless of the situation, human rights are expected to be maintained and safeguarded and it can be inferred from this that such rights are automatically terminated in times of war. Michael K’s futile attempts to obtain travel documents to Cape Town lawfully serve as an example of how much people rely on the efficient operation of all governmental institutions, while his entire life demonstrates the significance of personal freedom and freedom of movement. Michael K keeps quiet, not only because he is alone for most of his life, but also because silence is a subliminal kind of resistance. It makes no difference if Michael K is conscious of his heroic resistance or not; what counts is that he says very little because he has nothing to say. He is reluctant to share his tale. He does not want to be recognised, perceived, or misinterpreted.
This paper dwells on issues of dissolution of the individual, silence, other, state, and the position of the traumatised and the otherised in the gruesome and cruel apartheid in South Africa in John Maxwell Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K. For the discussion of the novel, the theoretical basis of the concepts such as the other, dissolution of state and silence are formed with reference to prominent postcolonial theorists’ views.
There is a growing scholarly attention on the intersection between environmental degradation and the exploitation of women as well as postcolonial environmental studies and gender studies in Africa. Previous writings on environmental exploitation in Africa often occlude how women are connected to and affected by the environment. Thus, this study explores the feminisation of nature in Ngugi Wa Thiongo's Petals of Blood and interrogates the patriarchal notions that genders nature in order to foreground its exploitation the same way women are exploited. The intersection of postcolonial ecocriticism and gender studies is explored and serves as the theoretical framework of this study. The theory is used to show the interconnection between the exploitation of women and the environment. Through critical analysis of the female characters and nonhuman nature, the paper explores the connection between the exploitation of the bodies of African women and nature in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood. It argues that in the Petals of Blood, Ngugi recognises the impact of environmental exploitation on African women, the similarity in the patterns of environmental and women exploitations; and the colonial, patriarchal and capitalist notions that foreground them. Ngugi thus imagines a form of environmental consciousness and activism that is championed by 'gendered-people' who are averse to all forms of exploitation and hegemony. The study establishes a nexus between environmental justice and gender equity; and suggests that in Petals of Blood, the exploitations of women and the environment are foregrounded in the notion that women and nature are material objects and thus exploitable.
This is a work of ecocriticism—the interdisciplinary study of literature and environment—
which takes as its point of departure the environmental and literary insights of Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). According to Ghosh the conventions of literary realism, and the context within which those conventions gained ascendancy, present a range of shortcomings in respect of the depiction of climate change in literature. This thesis brings Ghosh’s insights about literary realism into engagement with critiques of realism pertaining to postcolonial ecocriticism and African literature. I make the case for African science fiction—a blend of science fiction and magical realism exemplified by the works of Nnedi Okorafor—as an environmental literary form par excellence, able to overcome the challenges identified by Ghosh and, moreover, able innovatively to depict a range of African environmental issues. I explore the ecocritical potential of Okorafor’s fusion of magical realism and science fiction—two narrative forms with uncanny similarities that inhabit vastly different positions both within the African literary landscape and within the world of
literary criticism—by taking as case studies two of Okorafor’s novels, namely Who Fears
Death (2010) and Lagoon (2014). Exploring how Okorafor puts to use the conventions and
thematic elements of science fiction and magical realism in each novel, I find that her non-realist narrative modes, which incorporate African modes of apprehension of the world, create novels which address environmental concerns more rigorously than do realist novels.
The oral tradition in African society has always served the purpose of transmitting the values of the African people across generations among other functions of entertaining and provoking critical thought. In the emerging global concern over environmental sustainability, understanding the perspective from which people view and interact with the environment around them would provide insights into the human-induced challenges facing it, and how these challenges can be overcome. This paper thus posited that the oral repertoires of African societies would provide insights into the people’s perspective of the environment around them. This paper, therefore, undertook an examination of the oral literary forms such as incantations, proverbs, myths, and songs in Wasiu Abimbola’s Yoruba film titled Ikoko Ebora for the deployment of environmental aesthetics which are peculiar to the Yoruba culture. The study concluded that the deployment of environmental agencies in oral literary forms reflects the African conception of the environment as a functional entity and a complementary agency for the use of man.
Les poètes africains continuent à démontrer leur engagement social de diverses manières en créant des œuvres qui conscientisent les gens dans leur société. Bien que l'écocritique soit une théorie relativement nouvelle, ces poètes ont été préoccupés de divers problèmes qui affectent l’environnement afin de le protéger et préserver. Ijala, en tant que poésie orale popularisée par les chasseurs locaux chez les Yorubas de l’ouest du Nigeria, a été étudié par différents chercheurs de diverses perspectives. Cependant, sa pertinence écologique n'a pas bien été étudiée, aussi et plus important, ce genre n’a pas figuré dans le domaine d’études francophones. C'est dans cette optique que cet article aborde une lecture écocritique d’Ijala d’Ogundare Foyanmu. L’article vise à établir la conscience environnementale dans l’œuvre de ce poète d’origine yoruba. En s’appuyant sur le chant intitulé Omiyale, l’article révèle comment Foyanmu conseille le peuple à s'abstenir de sous-estimer avec mépris l'effet du danger de l'eau. L’article établit qu’Ijala, en tant que poème oral chez le Yoruba, ne se limite pas à la chasse ou à la vie des chasseurs. Il est également un moyen de plaidoyer et est utilisé pour traiter d’autres questions socio-politiques et économiques.
This article celebrates Okot p’Bitek’s contribution to East African literature in general and the song school of East Africa in particular, by revisiting one of his less-known works, Song of Prisoner on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. I subject the text to a close reading in order to demonstrate how p’Bitek uses imagery that is drawn from East Africa’s natural environment in a way that evokes issues that are an assault on the prevailing social and political order in East Africa at the time, in a nuanced manner. With the benefit of hindsight, the paper establishes that p’Bitek’s attempt to preserve his natural environment (that of East Africa) through writing it into his poetry, was a precursor for texts that would later be examined within the framework of the contemporary critical theory of postcolonial ecocriticism, and that using the text, one can narrow the scope further in a manner that takes into account the specificities of (East) African environmental literature. In so doing, the paper establishes that p’Bitek indeed highlights social realities through his poetry, in order to launch his attack on the existing neo-colonial capitalistic order prevailing at the historical moment of his writing, thus confirming that he displays a social vision that strives for decolonisation without the exploitative aftermath encapsulating modernity. The paper thus demonstrates how this poem is still relevant as a study to the student of East African literature reading it in the 21st century.
This dissertation examines contemporary literary depictions of climate change induced disasters through a South–South axis, exploring the resonances and dissonances between environmentalisms of the U.S. regional South and the global South. There are two driving factors for developing this framework. Within literary studies, numerous thinkers have, rightly, emphasized the asymmetrical relations between the global North and global South: historically, not only have countries from the North disproportionately contributed to the climate crisis, but they tend to funnel environmental toxicity into the “remote” South. I argue, however, that the resulting view of “the North” as destructive monolith often brushes past the unequal impacts of environmental violence within the North, obscuring the possibility of reading its marginalized regions in relation to the global South. This oversight, in turn, inhibits us from examining the shared histories, alliances, and imaginaries that exist between the regional South and the global South. My project attends to this discursive gap through a series of South–South comparative readings, with each pairing linked to a specific manifestation of climate disaster, such as hurricane, drought, and extinction. In my project, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Monique Roffey’s Archipelago model the complex temporalities of hurricanes, dislocating them from their typical associations with the swiftness of punctual violence. Paulo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book tap into the scalar versatility of the bildungsroman form to communicate the developmental dynamics that lead to and exacerbate the conditions of megadrought in the Anthropocene. Linda Hogan’s Power and Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Green Lion craft a new literary technique to enact the ripple effects of keystone species extinction. Through a reading of Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, my coda on “hope” reflects on how storytelling can help us actualize ecologically just futures. My project thus illustrates how writers and activists working in anti-colonial contexts theorize and represent specific experiences of climate disaster, and it articulates the anti-imperial strategies of survival that cut across geopolitical borders. Most importantly, this comparative approach enables us to more fully reckon with the simultaneously global and uneven dimensions of the climate crisis.
Nous assistons à une émergence de la littérature et de la critique littéraire africaine dans la discussion de l’écocritique. En effet, l’écocritique essaie de trouver des solutions possibles qui consisteront à corriger la situation écologique contemporaine en analysant les manières dont la nature et l’environnement sont représentés dans la littérature. La combinaison de l’écocritique et des études postcoloniales a donné lieu à de nouvelles pensées critiques où les idées d’identité, de terre, de culture, des rapports de force, d’environnement etc. peuvent être abordés par de nouveaux aperçus. Les recherches littéraires montrent que L’enfant noir (1953) de Camara Laye n’a pas été analysé d’une perspective écocritique. En tant que l’un des premiers textes de la littérature francophone d’Afrique de l’ouest, ce roman peut ouvrir à de nouvelles perspectives pour la discussion de cette discipline en se focalisant la mythologie africaine. Notre étude est une tentative de relecture de ce classique africain.
Various researchers have offered critical opportunities for reading the Rwandan genocide literature in general and the testimony of Scholastique Mukasonga in particular through trauma and memory studies. And these anthropocentric and phenomenological approaches have paid insignificant attention to environmental issues consciously or unconsciously raised in the texts, providing a minimalist and myopic reading of African war texts and Mukasonga's Rwandan genocide accounts. My study intends to examine the "marginalized presences" of a traumatized ecology in the writing of Scholastique Mukasonga representing the Rwandan genocide and its impacts on the natural environment of the Rwandan society. My methodology involves critical and textual analysis of sampled texts drawn from Mukasonga's Inyenzi ou les cafards and La Femme aux pieds nus, using postcolonial ecocritical theory to assess the Rwandan ethnic conflict and its ecological implication. My findings are organized around issues of postcolonial ecocriticism such as tropes of animalization of enemy tribes, ecological trauma, nature and culture, among others. This shows that otherness, stereotypes and political hegemony give impetus to the concept of "animalized tribes" and "ethnic cleansing" and lead to "multiple forms of ecodegradation" represented in the literary texts under study.
This article examines Ekpe Inyang's play entitled The Hill Barbers (2010) using postcolonial ecocriticism. Combining postcolonial theory and ecocriticism-in order to foreground the author's postcolonial Cameroonian/African society, the article investigates some of the numerous ecology-related issues raised in the play, among which deforestation, exploitation, capitalism, agency for nature, and the apocalyptic trope. It emerges, from both the play and article, that humans are destroying nature and are consequently suffering from this very destruction. Among the many effects of environmental destruction felt by the Mbungoe human community of the play are acute shortages of drinking water and dwindling animal species on their hills and mountains. One of the major findings of this article is the author's ability to reconcile hitherto opposing ideologies and practices, such as Judeo-Christianity and African religions and Western science and African traditions, in seeking ways of redressing the increasing ecological problems faced within Cameroonian/African communities and elsewhere around the globe, advocating sustainable behaviour and respect for nature. The paper joins ongoing research attempts to apply ecocriticism in reading literature from postcolonial African societies. Resumen Este artículo examina la obra teatral de Ekpe Inyang titulada The Hill Barbers (2010) usando la ecocrítica postcolonial. Combinando la teoría postcolonial y la ecocrítica, el artículo analiza algunas de las numerosas cuestiones relacionadas con la ecología que se plantean en la obra, cuestiones como la deforestación, la explotación, el capitalismo, la preservación de la naturaleza y el tropo apocalíptico. De la obra y del artículo se desprende que los seres humanos están destruyendo la naturaleza y, por consiguiente, sufren los efectos de esta misma destrucción. Entre las muchas consecuencias de la destrucción ambiental sufridas por la comunidad Mbungoe en la pieza teatral están la escasez aguda de agua potable y la disminución de las especies animales en sus colinas y montañas. Uno de los principales hallazgos de este artículo es la capacidad del autor para conciliar ideologías y prácticas hasta entonces opuestas, como el judeocristianismo, las religiones africanas, la ciencia occidental y las tradiciones africanas, al buscar formas de corregir los crecientes problemas ecológicos a los que se enfrentan tanto las comunidades camerunesas/africanas como otras en diversas partes del mundo. De esta manera, se aboga por un comportamiento sostenible y por el respeto hacia la naturaleza. El artículo supone una contribución a los intentos actuales de hacer una lectura de la literatura producida en las sociedades postcoloniales africanas a través del prisma de la ecocrítica.
Hierdie navorsing bied 'n ekokrities-filosofiese blik op die verhaal "Katvoet" uit die gelyk-namige kortverhaalbundel deur Riana Scheepers (2009). Die navorsing is interdissiplinêr van aard en betrek die dissipline van filosofie sowel as letterkundige studie. "Katvoet" bevraagteken die antroposentriese perspektief deur alternatiewe perspektiewe te beklemtoon en 'n alterverhaal te skep wat parallel met die antroposentriese verhaal verloop. Die vrou se verhouding met diere en die natuur weerspreek die algemene aannames oor die mens en die natuur en die rol van die natuur in die mens se wêreld. Die vrou verdierlik in die verhaal en hierdie verdierliking skep die weg tot 'n verfrissende en nuwe siening van die absolute binêre opposisies van kultuur en natuur, rasionaliteit en emosies, die mens en die dier, objek en subjek, en "mind" en liggaam. Die vrou se verhouding met die natuur en diere plaas die mens en die natuur op gelyke voet en die natuur word nie onderdruk deur die mens nie. Die verhaal bied ook die geleentheid om die konsep natuur te herdefinieer teen die agtergrond van die verskuiwende verhoudings met die natuur.
In Etosha (Piet van Rooyen, 2010) the impact and aftereffect of the colonial system on the Etosha Nasional Park in Namibia, and on the people who lived there, is portrayed. This study explores the situations of various characters and groups who formerly resided there, focusing on aspects of their relation with one another as well as on the realities of colonial exploitation and the use/destruction of the natural environment. The question raised is how green postcolonialism takes form in this novel as a result of the convergence of conservation oriented and postcolonial perspectives. The study focuses on the ways Etosha challenges the reader to realize the full complexity of the question: ‘Who is actually right, what is justifiable in the battle for survival?’, specifically in our local context; and on how the reader is confronted with the task to find place specific answers for questions aimed at our situation in Africa. It is found that the situations of various role players and their different viewpoints are depicted in a nuanced and convincing manner, contributing to the realistic portrayal of the complex issue of conservation versus exploitation in the postcolonial context. Etosha is a meaningful novel when evaluated within the context of the development of ecocriticism in South Africa.
In betreklik onlangse navorsing deur David Barnhill word 'n nuwe benadering tot natuurgesentreerde skryfwerk voorgestel. Sy navorsing dui eerstens aan dat daar in die beskrywing van die aard van natuurgesentreerde skryfwerk hoofsaaklik gesteun word op sisteme van klassifikasie. Barnhill wys egter op nadele in die taksonomie-benadering en stel voor dat 'n spesifieke natuurgesentreerde woordwerk beskou word as 'n ekosisteem. Daarmee word bedoel dat die kategorieë waarin natuurgerigte skryfwerk geplaas word wanneer die taksonomie- benadering gevolg word, veelvoudige elemente word in individuele werke en dat hierdie elemente binne elke teks saam- of op mekaar inwerk, soos die organismes in 'n ekosisteem. In hierdie ondersoek word Barnhill se teoretiese gereedskap in Deel 1 uiteengesit en in Deel 2, wat gepubliseer word in die Maart 2017-uitgawe van die tydskrif, getoets. Schalk Schoombie se debuutroman, Boomkastele: 'n sprokie van 'n stadsmens (2015) word bestudeer vanuit die hipotetiese uitgangspunt dat die teks 'n ekosisteem is ten opsigte van die kenmerkende elemente van natuurgesentreerde skryfwerk daarin.
Analisamos neste artigo a cronica A piracema do Tocantins , de Murilo Brandao Vilela, utilizando para tanto, como referencial teorico, a Critica Pos-Colonial e a Ecocritica. Ao longo da analise, demonstramos no texto um descompasso entre o tempo natural da piracema e o recorte temporal da legislacao ambiental a respeito, o que torna ineficazes as iniciativas no sentido de proteger e preservar as condicoes ideais para a preservacao da vida no Rio Tocantins.
Human cultural products have negotiated—revealed, reinterpreted, and shaped—ecological changes since prehistoric times. Paleolithic cave paintings dating to well before 30,000 BCE give diverse perspectives on early human practices that altered environments. Human language has played an even more significant role in transforming and transformed ecosystems. It has been used to command, describe, justify, celebrate, condemn, encourage amelioration of, and both divert attention from and call attention to human treatment of environments. For thousands of years oral and written texts from around the world have probed not only how people are affected by their surroundings but also how and why they alter environments near and far. References in literature to constructing, inhabiting, and dismantling built environments as well as to hunting, agriculture, and eating all give insight into changed landscapes. Even creative texts that do not include human characters often at least mention human-induced transformation of environments. For its part, world literature—understood broadly as creative texts that have circulated beyond their culture(s) of origin— has since The Epic of Gilgamesh (second millennium BCE) depicted people as radically changing their surroundings.
Nobel laureate Coetzee's novel Disgrace is loaded with rich meanings. Read from a postcolonial-ecocritical perspective, the novel manifests the worsening ecological environment in post apartheid South Africa. The eco-environmental problems are reflected through the conflicts between the White and the Black, the appropriation of the land by the White and the "losening" of animals for the benefit of human beings. These problems are the consequences of South Africa's long history of colonization and racial apartheid. However, hope for the future can still be sensed from the novel. To some extent, Disgrace expresses a call for the construction of a harmonious ecological environment in South Africa.
"Postcolonial Green brings together scholarship bridging ecocriticism and postcolonialism. Since its inception, ecocriticism has been accused of being inattentive to the complexities that colonialism poses for ideas of nature and environmentalism. Postcolonial discourse, on the other hand, has been so immersed in theoretical questions of nationalism and identity that it has been seen as ignoring environmental or ecological concerns. This collection demonstrates that ecocriticism and postcolonialism must be understood as parallel projects if not facets of the very same project-a struggle for global justice and sustainability. The essays in this collection span the globe, and cover such issues as international environmental policy, land and water rights, food production, poverty, women's rights, indigenous activism, and ecotourism. They consider all manner of texts, from oral tradition to literary fiction to web discourse. Contributors bring postcolonial theory to literary traditions, such as that of the United States, not typically seen in this light, and, conversely, bring ecocriticism to literary traditions, such as those of India and China, that have seen little ecological analysis. Postcolonial Green boasts a global geographical breadth, diversity of critical approach, and increasing relevance to the issues we face on a world stage. © 2010 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. All rights reserved.
Engaging important discussions about social conflict, environmental change, and imperialism in Africa, Different Shades of Green points to legacies of African environmental writing, often neglected as a result of critical perspectives shaped by dominant Western conceptions of nature and environmentalism. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework employing postcolonial studies, political ecology, environmental history, and writing by African environmental activists, Byron Caminero-Santangelo emphasizes connections within African environmental literature, highlighting how African writers have challenged unjust, ecologically destructive forms of imperial development and resource extraction. Different Shades of Green also brings into dialogue a wide range of African creative writing-including works by Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Nuruddin Farah, Wangari Maathai, and Ken Saro-Wiwa-in order to explore vexing questions for those involved in the struggle for environmental justice, in the study of political ecology, and in the environmental humanities, urging continued imaginative thinking in effecting a more equitable, sustain-able future in Africa. © 2014 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. All rights reserved.
This second edition of Postcolonial Ecocriticism, a book foundational for its field, has been updated to consider recent developments in the area such as environmental humanities and animal studies. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examine transverse relations between humans, animals and the environment across a wide range of postcolonial literary texts and also address key issues such as global warming, food security, human over-population in the context of animal extinction, queer ecology, and the connections between postcolonial and disability theory. Considering the postcolonial first from an environmental and then a zoocritical perspective, the book looks at. Narratives of development in postcolonial writing. Entitlement, belonging and the pastoral. Colonial 'asset stripping' and the Christian mission. The politics of eating and the representation of cannibalism. Animality and spirituality. Sentimentality and anthropomorphism. The changing place of humans and animals in a 'posthuman' world. With a new preface written specifically for this edition and an annotated list of suggestions for further reading, Postcolonial Ecocriticism offers a comprehensive and fully up-to-date introduction to a rapidly expanding field. © 2010, 2015 Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin. All rights reserved.
Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland depicts the opening stages of the Zionist settler-colonial project in Mandate Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Specifically, Herzl represents land use, agricultural labour and Zionist collectivism, in other words the material means by which settler-colonisation can be achieved. This essay examines utopia and other literary strategies including Bildungsroman to demonstrate the narrative trajectory’s move away from an underdeveloped environment and society towards a prosperous one. This essay argues that in Altneuland Herzl projects a vision of settler-colonialism that is different to the contemporaneous reality, such that the text can be regarded as an alternative to the real-world ‘utopian’ project of Israel/Palestine.
This article offers new insights into how Wangari Maathai's rhetoric of emplacement may be productively understood as a growing form of postcolonial communication, which is amenable to criticism and theory-building in rhetorical studies. Maathai's emplaced rhetoric (ER) addressed postcolonial oppressions while emphasizing peacebuilding. ER is a form of postcolonial symbolic and discursive message-making found in a variety of communication contexts, often political, intercultural, and international exchanges about the environment. Prevailing literature on environmental communication features rhetorics that relate to colonial caused inequities, but little has been discussed in terms of connecting peacebuilding rhetoric of African women's leadership to environmental sustainability. ER functions as a heuristic move to restore agency, interconnection and wholeness of sentient beings and ecosystems within the postcolonial context; it is the peacebuilder's transcendence over dominant discourses that normalize displacement and fragmentation. This rhetorical analysis of recent texts of Maathai as a major peacebuilder in environmental and social justice activism serves as an antidote to the gap in contemporary criticism of postcolonial and environmental confluences in communication.
Ecocriticism, or the study of nature-culture intersections, has expanded its critical and geographic scope well beyond the study of modern American and English nature writing with which it originated. Ecocritics increasingly pay attention to issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and national identity in their interrogations of cultural inflections of nature, and are also starting to consider pre-modern periods. This article builds on three of these many developments: early modern ecocriticism, a specifically French écopensée, and queer ecology, suggesting a multi-dimensional, articulated approach that can help us continue to question the premises of the nature-culture divide.
Water has been acknowledged as a key area of dispute in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In particular, water stress in the occupied territories of the West Bank has been exacerbated by Israel’s colonization of water resources via the Oslo II agreements and, latterly, the erection of a separation wall that articulates a hydropolitical agenda. This article argues that Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, a memoir of Barghouti’s return to the West Bank after thirty years in exile, offers a sustained engagement with the environmental politics of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, most particular the politics of water. Via his reflections on metaphor and metonymy in particular, Barghouti responds to the central question posed in the memoir — “Does a poet live in space or time?” — with the presentation of a distinctively liquid vision of life in exile and in the occupied territories. As such, I Saw Ramallah presents an instance of what Rob Nixon calls the “decentring of environmentalism” in which postcolonial insights offer a corrective to bioregional approaches that neglect politics.
The nature of ecopoetics against the background of ecocritical theory with reference to poems by Martjie Bosman
Thus man, this world's vice-emperor, in whom
All faculties, all graces are at home;
And if in other creatures they appear,
They're but man's ministers, and legates there,
To work on their rebellions, and reduce
Them to civility and to man's use. (Donne 1971:275)
As far back as 1611 the metaphysical poet John Donne described the relationship between man and nature in his poem “An anatomy of the World”, words that resound in the many current debates on man’s abuse of the non-human world which surrounds him. Donne claims that other creatures – a phrase which can be read as referring to the whole non-human world – are subjected to the mercy and instrumental use of man. Later in the same poem he describes how the world is broken apart and how connection and interconnectivity are lost – a thought that is currently resonating in global discussions on ecology.
Lawrence Buell, one of the pioneers of the ecocritical movement, writes in his study The future of environmental criticism (2005:1–2) that the earliest stories of mankind were those that dealt with earth and creation and with God and man’s transformative interference with it, which is an indication of the fact that environmental consciousness and criticism as a developing discipline has ancient roots.
In this article the focus of investigation includes two areas, presented in two parts. The first part, which is the main focus of the article, presents a theoretical background to the concepts of ecocriticism and ecopoetics. It serves in particular as an attempt to establish an encompassing definition of ecopoetry.
As a critical theory, ecocriticism does not yet have the same status as, for instance, postcolonialism or postmodernism, but there is an increasing call for the study of place in the same way as class, race and gender. The interdisciplinary character of ecocriticism makes precise definition difficult, and, as Cook (1994:2) comments, ecocriticism can be seen as inclusive rather than exclusive, without the need to draw boundaries.
An ecological perspective would mean that the whole can be perceived in terms of the connectivity of the parts. Elgin (1983:8) describes it as follows:
It means trying to see a whole which is enormous and complex – and a cosmic view so threatening of man’s image of himself – that we are tempted to retreat to our comfortable broom closets of specialized knowledge, to fragments of information re-assuring precisely because they have simplified our world to a point at which we can understand it.
The diversity of the ecocritical field of investigation includes the following questions, among others: the meaning of the concept nature; the concept wilderness (as chaos) and how perceptions of it has changed through time; commentary on land/earth and the way in which we live on it; criticism on who we are, how we have been living and how a new way of living can be constructed; personal connection and a sense of responsibility on the topic; a new awareness of, and interest in, how changing landscapes are being explored and represented by authors; the difference between landscape and environment; investigations on landscape as emotional space, as memory, melodrama and sentiment; how the moral geography of space and place looks; how environmental literature and politics are related; and the way in which ecopoetry and ecocriticism lead to different strategies of action other than environmental policy. Ecocriticism also presents a broadening perspective on the way in which nature and wilderness are being looked at as the new Other.
The exploration of the nature and range of the ecocritical movement is, in the words of Buell (2005:1), “an increasingly heterogeneous movement” and a road “bestrewn by obstacles both external and self-imposed”. Thus, one of the exciting developments in the field of ecologically engaged writing is the investigation of the concept of poetics. Skinner (2001:7), in his journal ecopoetics, suggests that ecopoetics is a writing practice of making habitable, of language entrenched in the materiality and relations that subsume our shared environment:
“Eco” here signals – no more, no less – the house we share with several million other species, our planet Earth. “Poetics” is used as poesis or making, not necessarily to emphasize the critical over the creative act (nor vice versa). Thus: ecopoetics, a house making. (Skinner 2001:5)
In his liminal text Ecopoetry: A critical introduction J. Scott Bryson defines ecopoetry as follows:
Ecopoetry is a subset of nature poetry, that, while adhering to certain conventions of romanticism, also advances beyond that tradition and takes on distinctly contemporary problems and issues, thus resulting in a version of nature poetry generally marked by three primary characteristics. (Bryson 2002:5)
He identifies these three characteristics as (1) the recognition of the interdependent nature of the world, (2) the humility in the relationship with both the human and non-human world and (3) an intense scepticism against hyper-reality and excessive technology (2002:5–6). Bryson’s definition is later expanded to include the terminology poiesis. This word comes from the Greek word ποιέω, which means “to make”, and forms the root of the modern word poetry, which initially was used as a verb, an action which transforms and propels the world.
The definition of ecopoetics within the broader framework of ecocriticism has received no attention in the field of Afrikaans literary theory so far. In the first part of the article questions about the nature of ecopoetry are asked against the backdrop of ecocritical theory and a comprehensive definition is formulated. A number of structural and conceptual markers or attributes are identified which are typical of ecopoetry. The varied creative practices and ideological threads suggest a multifaceted and hybrid nature, alluding to the creative-critical boundaries between poetry and ecology and the interdisciplinary nature of ecopoetics. Such practices and concepts include the following: emplaced writing; whole page-space writing; the concept of the poem as landscape and landscape as poem; open-form writing; dynamic spacing; recycling of texts; dynamic partnership writing practices; complex sound patterns and sound play.
Attention is given to aspects of the sublime and the revised (postcolonial) sublime and how the fracturing of the poem creates inner tension, disrupts the inner coherence of the poem and creates new coherence whereby the co-existence of beauty and non-beauty is established. An ecopoem, according to Arigo (n.d.:3), is a poem under tension: “a tension located at the intersection of human interference and destruction and the beauty of nature”. Boundaries between beauty and non-beauty and between nature and culture are revoked.
The encompassing definition which I propose is: Ecopoetry is poetry that does not deal exclusively with nature and ecological questions, but searches for a way to appreciate, understand and express through language the co-existence of man and nature. Ecopoetry is more than poetry. It is movement which springs from the tension at the point where man and nature intersect and tries to create systematic coherence of the whole, which often happens through the destabilising and fracturing of the poem and creating a new concept of beauty and of home and of place, a place that we share with other species on this planet.
In the second, short part of the article, selected poems by Martjie Bosman from the volume Toevallige tekens (2010) are discussed by asking: What does an ecopoem look like? Common themes and characteristics present in ecopoetry are identified. Attention is given to four areas of coherence and interconnectivity, as manifested in ecopoetry: the ecology of the visual, with special reference to the front page and title; the ecology of beauty; the ecology of place and the ecology of poem structure and processes.
In conclusion: Morton (2010:11) states that “[a]ll poems are environmental, because they include the spaces in which they are written and read – blank spaces around and between words, silence within the sound.” Ecocriticism, and in particular, ecopoetry, allows the reader a fresh perspective on poetry, challenging the established perceptions of place and environment and nature. It allows for the interconnectivity and relationship to be studied. It challenges the space and place of the poem itself, and of what is left as open, white space. Man becomes the listener, on the edge, to the voice of the natural world:
You own nothing
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was the other way round. (Atwood 1995:109)
Key words: ecocriticism; ecopoetics; ecopoetry; ecological connectivity; revised sublime; postmodern sublime; new Other; fractions; fracturing
Neither “globalization theory” nor “postcolonial studies” are terms that easily reveal their meanings. The areas of knowledge to which they refer are not what they seem, and a great deal of confusion surrounds their uses. Readers would be forgiven for thinking that “globalization theory” denoted an emergent body of writing called forth by inexorable recent developments in technology and communications, as well as radical shifts in the world economy and in geopolitics, all of them presaging the rise of a truly global culture - the obliteration of state sovereignty in a world marked by fluidity and border-crossing. In turn, these readers might suppose that “postcolonial studies” referred to an inaugural critique of Eurocentrism prompted by a new diasporic wave of intellectuals from the former colonies resident in metropolitan centers who - informed by postwar theories of language and representation - began in the late 1970s to cast older versions of “Western Man” in doubt in an act of writing back to Empire. Actually, neither is the case. One has to begin by distinguishing between the study of global issues or colonial pasts per se and the fairly recent creation of schools of thought that retrospectively appropriate the more general cases fleetingly echoed in their names. When invoked in European or North American universities since the beginning of the 1990s, globalization theory and postcolonial studies turn out to be very specialized discursive formations passing for older and more varied types of enquiry. This slippage between connotation and code is one of the first things to understand about the conjunction of the two terms.
Postcolonial studies emerged in the 1980s. By this time, the great era of Third-World anticolonial nationalism was at an end, and violent ethnic communalism was beginning to assume global dimensions. Such political shifts fed the tendency of postcolonial studies to regard nationalism as inherently dominatory, absolutist, essentialist, and destructive. The 1980s additionally witnessed the global expansion and intensification of capitalism. This led to the popular academic view that the era of nation-states was itself nearing a close and that nationalism was therefore redundant (Hobsbawm 1993). These tendencies were further fueled by developments in critical theory. The culturalist turn of social and literary theory, poststructuralist critiques of Enlightenment rationality and modernity - these encouraged postcolonial studies to view nationalism as a primarily cultural and epistemological, rather than socio-political, formation. This accompanied the view that nationalism was, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suggested, “a reverse or displaced legitimation of colonialism,” doomed to repeat the “epistemic violence” of the colonialism it had rejected (1999: 62). Less antagonistic are the approaches associated with Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1991, first published 1983). In these, nationalism is construed as Janus-faced, paradoxical in its cultural, temporal modernity and simultaneous reliance on the past to define and legitimate itself.
In this essay, I offer a reading of Edward W. Said's intellectual politics and of his understanding of intellectualism. I begin by discussing the debate over the status and value of Said's most celebrated and influential book, Orientalism, situating this debate in the context both of the reassertion of imperial dominance that began in the 1970s and is still very much in train and—within the academy—of the rise of postcolonial studies. Said's politics were left-wing, liberationist, and nationalitarian; as such, they were always decidedly different from those of most of his postcolonialist readers and interlocutors. I explain why I regard Orientalism as atypical of Said's work as a whole, and move on to consider his various commentaries (most notably in Representations of the Intellectual), on the social role of intellectuals. These commentaries make abundantly clear that Said wrote from premises and on behalf of principles quite different from those generally prevailing in postcolonial studies. Particularly brilliant in Said's representation of the intellectual, I suggest, is his clear-sighted awareness of what might be specific to intellectual work, that is, his grasp of what it is that intellectuals do that might be both socially valuable and also not within the remit of any other group of social agents. In closing, I use Pierre Bourdieu (who has also written superbly on intellectual labor) to pinpoint some potential weaknesses in Said's account of intellectuals.
The culture of environmentalism in South Africa changed through the 1990s, influenced by the country's transition to democratic government. Environmentalism during the apartheid era retained features of an earlier colonial interest in conservation, but with the political change, tendencies have emerged that link environmental and social well-being in ways that are ‘people-centred’. This new culture can be understood as developing a postcolonial understanding of ecology, one that grasps the continued influence of colonialism as well as the present positioning of South Africa within a global order dominated by countries of the North (and in particular the United States). Ecology in this context is deeply implicated in a postcolonial politics. This article reads two recent works of prose fiction by South African writers, J.M. Coetzee and Zakes Mda, against these developments in the environmental culture, claiming that they develop a similar implication for ecology. Drawing on postmodern strategies to destabilise meaning, they articulate a carefully circumscribed value for ecology within current social and cultural orders. The article suggests that South Africa's emerging environmental culture can also provide ways of reading limits to the works of fiction.