RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Out of Africa: ecocriticism beyond the boundary of environmental justice
A1 Egya, Sule Emmanuel
K1 Africa
K1 Natural world
K1 Spiritual practices
K1 Decentredness
K1 África
K1 Mundo natural
K1 Prácticas espirituales
K1 Descentralización
K1 Literatura
K1 Literature
K1 Medio ambiente
K1 Environmental science
AB This essay is an attempt to present a broader view of ecocriticism in Africa. Ecocriticism, in theory and practice, appears to have limited itself to the notion of environmental justice, rooted in a protest aesthetics, traditional to African literature, with the aim of raising consciousness against institutional powers behind ecological crises. The reason for this is not far-fetched. International scholarship on African ecocriticism tends to focus on the activism of the Kenyan Wangari Mathai and the Nigerian Ken Saro-Wiwa; and on the fiction of a few writers concerned with environmentalism and conservation. This kind of ecocriticism, under the rubric of postcolonialism, is, in my view, narrow, too human-centred, and should, in fact, be decentred for an all-inclusive mapping of African ecocriticism. I attempt to shift this paradigm by foregrounding a narrative that stages the role and agency of nonhuman and spiritual materialities in practices that demonstrate nature-human relations since the pre-colonial period. I argue that for a proper delineation of the theory and practice of ecocriticism in Africa, attention should be paid to literary and cultural artefacts that depict Africa’s natural world in which humans sometimes find themselves helpless under the agency of other-than-human beings, with whom they negotiate the right path for the society. I conclude by making the point that a recognition of this natural world, and humans’ right place in it, is crucial to any ecocritical project that imagines an alternative to the present human-centred system.
PB Universidad de Alcalá
SN 2171-9594
YR 2020
FD 2020
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10017/45590
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10017/45590
LA eng
DS MINDS@UW
RD 19-abr-2024