Kirk B. Sides

Environmental Entanglements

Environmental Entanglements: African Literature's Ecological Imaginary traces a long history of ecological thought in African literature. Reading African literatures as environmental literatures, Environmental Entanglements offers an interventional step back beyond the mid-twentieth century moment of political independence. Thinking about 'entanglement' to represent relations ecologically, the book explores a form which it argues is an ecological imaginary, animating many African literary and cultural repertoires. This ecological form gives story to experiences of transversal of (colonial and apartheid) boundaries, the movement of peoples, and the cultural and social relations enacted upon land. Focusing on literary and filmic texts, from the writers such as Thomas Mofolo and Sol Plaatje in the early twentieth century, to contemporary science and speculative fiction producers like Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu, Environmental Entanglements argues that cultural archives from the African continent display a history of ecological awareness that predates the moment of mid-twentieth century decolonization. The book is premised on the idea that imagining ecologically as a form of representing relations is not a belated preoccupation in African literatures, but rather these early ecological imaginaries present an opportunity to delink notions such as environmentalism, ecology, and ecocriticism from postcoloniality. Reading ecology as an animating, organizing trope in African literatures from at least the start of the twentieth century, the book offers a genealogy of the present, in which the increasingly popular forms of ecologically-oriented African futurism and speculative fiction are part of a history of thinking the future through ecological form in African literatures.