Description
This edited volume brings together fresh voices, both emerging and established, on the ecocritical landscape within African literatures and cultures. In the era of the Anthropocene, the editors and contributors demonstrate how African cultural products address climate and ecological concerns, including activism, animal and plant conservation, climate change, environmental degradation, food security, disasters, ecosystems, and social injustice. The volume offers critical and comparative analyses that transcend the boundaries of languages (e.g., English and French), places (e.g., countries, continents, and geographies), and textual genres (e.g., drama and theater, poetry, prose, children’s literature, orature, newspapers, archaeology, and interviews). Significantly, it foregrounds the intersectionality of ecological issues with social, economic, and political dimensions. By doing so, it highlights how environmental challenges are intricately linked to questions of identity, space, justice, and indigenous knowledge systems. While espousing classical textual analysis and beginning to gesture towards empirical experimentation, the volume exemplifies ongoing decolonial and postcolonial approaches in environmental humanities from the African continent and the Global South/Majority.
Praise
Fresh African Ecocritical Voices in African Literatures and Cultures is a groundbreaking and timely intervention in African literary and cultural studies. By centering African-based scholars and critics, the volume reclaims ecocriticism from its Euro-American dominance and situates Africa as a critical site for rethinking environmental thought and practice.
What distinguishes this book is its breadth and depth: traversing oral traditions, poetry, fiction, theatre, and cultural practices, the contributors highlight how ecological concerns are embedded in African cultural memory and artistic creativity. The essays do more than analyze; they reimagine ecocriticism through indigenous epistemologies and postcolonial frameworks, offering fresh paradigms that are both theoretically robust and culturally grounded.
This collection is both visionary and urgent. It demonstrates that African ecocriticism is not simply responsive to global crises but actively reshapes how we understand the entanglements of environment, culture, and justice. I wholeheartedly endorse it as an essential resource for scholars, students, and practitioners committed to decolonizing knowledge and envisioning sustainable futures.
Professor Enongene Sone, Walter Sisulu University
Fresh Ecocritical Voices in African Literatures and Cultures is a groundbreaking contribution to the field of African Ecocriticism, which sets a new benchmark for understanding the complex relationships between human and non-human worlds. The authors’ insightful analyses and compelling arguments shed new light on the intersections of ecology, politics, culture and literary sociology. Significantly, the innovative approach and rigorous scholarship of the book make it an indispensable resource for scholars and students of African literature, environmental studies, and cultural theory, as well as anyone interested in understanding the critical role of ecocriticism in shaping African literary and cultural imagination.
Dr Abba Abba, Winner, NIGERIA-LNG 2019 Prize; ANA Prizes for Literary Criticism 2019 & 2022
Fresh Ecocritical Voices in African Literatures and Cultures is a significant contribution to the growing scholarly attention to the intersection of culture and environment in Africa. Its strengths include the foregrounding of a comparative literary-environmental analysis of Francophone and Anglophone cultural practices, the privileging of fresh voices in ecocriticism on the continent, and the centring of a cross-genre interdisciplinary context that expands the scope of African ecocriticism. I have the strong view that this essay collection introduces a new generation of African ecocritical scholars with the potential to enrich global ecocritical discourse with African ecological epistemologies. The book, to say the least, charts new directions and would long remain an invaluable treasure to students and scholars of environmental humanities.
Sule Emmanuel Egya,
Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Nigeria
Fresh Ecocritical Voices in African Literatures and Cultures foreground the environment as central to artistic and cultural expression. The essays in this book highlight how issues related to environmental crises and emergency intersect with histories of colonial exploitation and postcolonial governance. These voices recover indigenous ecological knowledge and cosmologies as alternatives to exploitative systems. They challenge Western anthropocentric ecocriticism by situating Africa’s environmental crises within global capitalism and local survival struggles. Ultimately, they envision literature and culture as spaces for justice, resistance, and sustainable futures.
– Ogaga Okuyade
Contents
Introduction: On Fresh Ecocritical Voices in African Literatures and Cultures 1
Chinonye Ekwueme-Ugwu, Joyce Agofure, & Nsah Mala
Exploring African Ecocriticism in Three African Literary Texts 19
Joyce Onoromhenre Agofure & Ezekiel Solomon Akuso
Resisting Anthropocentrism: Reading Deep Ecology in Selected Poems of Alice Oswald and Nol Alembong 35
Mary Louisa Lum
That All May Be Green: Investigating Three Francophone African Narratives as Ecomedia 51
Eunice E. Omonzejie
Rhinos, Rangers, and (Eco) Returns in Contemporary South African Literature 69
Beverley Jane Cornelius & Jean Rossmann
Eco-activism, Eco-disasters, and Vulnerability in Niyi Osundare’s “Our Earth Will Not Die” and Kinno Yukie’s “God” 87
Sunday Olaoluwagbamila Dawodu & Gracious Ojiebun
Place and Socio-natural Environment in the Poetry of Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo & Warsan Shire 103
Deborah Chinonyerem Uzoma
Environmental Degradation: Interrogating Triggers
and Paradigms in Select African Imaginaries 115
Victory Ogochukwu Okpala, Ezinwanyi Edikanabasi Adam, & Arinze Thankgod Okpala
Outrage and Marginal Communities: Postcolonial and Ecocritical Meditations on Jerry Buhari’s Landscapes of the Soul (1993-2022) 131
Dominic James Aboi
Art and Society: An Ecocritical Reading of Aliyu Kamal’s Fire in My Backyard and EE Sule’s Makwala 153
Abubakar Shehu Usman
Towards Harmonious African Ecosystems: Estrangement and Resilience in Ibirawi Ikiriko and Nnimmo Bassey’s Poetry Collections 167
Abundance Amamchukwu
Theatrical Design, Environment, and Children’s Theatre Practice in the ABU Studio Theatre 179
Franklin Zaure
Greg Mbaijiorgu’s Wake Up Everyone and the Scourge of Climate Change on Food Security 199
Hameed Olutoba Lawal & Tijime Justin Awuawuer
The Nigerian Creative Writer and Ecocritical Challenges in the 21st Century: An Appraisal of Adamu Kyuka Usman’s Death of Eternity 215
Suleiman A. Jaji
Folktale as a Pedagogical Agent for Social Justice: An Ecocritical Perspective 233
Tayo Olubunmi Agboola
Language Framing of Climate Change and Ecocritical Consciousness in Nigerian Newspapers 251
Zulfaa Yushau-Waziri
Archeological Alternatives: Towards Africa’s Eco-cultural Sustainability 277
Arthur Nebengou Njume Ndeley
Experimenting with Empirical Ecocriticism: Author and Ecological Imaginaries beyond the Text 293
Chinonye Ekwueme-Ugwu & Chiamaka Ugoka
Three Cameroonians on the Futures of African Ecocriticisms: Interviews with Nnane Ntube, Ekpe Inyang, and Nji Tem 311
Nsah Mala
Contributors 323
Index 329
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