African Literature and the Environment: A Study in Postcolonial Ecocriticism, examines how African literary texts document, critique, and offer alternative visions on ecological crises such as the Niger-Delta oil pollution and the dumping of toxic wastes in African waters. The study challenges the anthropocentricism dominating African environmental literary scholarship and addresses a gap in mainstream ecocriticism which typically occludes Africa’s environmental problems. While African literary criticism often focuses on impacts of environmental problems on humans, my dissertation, in contrast, explores the entanglements of humans and nonhumans. The study contributes to globalizing ecocriticism, expands the bourgeoning corpus of ecological investigations in African literary criticism, and participates in efforts to foster interdisciplinary connections between the humanities and the sciences.Following the lead of postcolonial ecocritics, like Rob Nixon, who have pressed the need for dialogue between ecocriticism and postcolonialism, Chapter One interprets Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture, and Gayatri Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason as an archive for environmental inquiry. In Chapter Two, I track representations of ecological crisis in the Niger Delta novels of Gabriel Okara, Isidore Okpewho, and Tanure Ojaide to argue that these texts spotlight the progressive devastation of the Delta esnvironment.While critics have celebrated the human agency implicit in bombing oil installations and oil bunkering as forms of resistance in the novels, I draw attention to its limits, positing the ecological challenges posed by the resulting oil spill, flooding, etc., to the ecology, and argue on the need for alternative means of addressing the problem. Chapter Three brings into view the environmental despoilment caused by the Somalian wars depicted in the novels of Nuruddin Farah. This chapter is informed by the recent materialist turn in ecocriticism. I show that the interplay of the human and nonhuman aspects of the Somalian ecology produces types of agency that move us away from African literary criticism’s conventional anthropocentric assessment of the toll of war. By considering the capacities of the landscape, animals, and other nonhumans to produce agency in Maps, Secrets, Links, and Crossbones, the chapter argues that Farah’s work enables us to rethink anthropocentric agency. Ultimately, I foreground the interactions of humans and nonhumans in a war scenario and highlight the shared suffering and agency that their interactions produce.The final chapter extends my analysis of human-nonhuman interactions by attending to the contradictions that often characterize such relations. Informed by Karen Thornber’s notion of ecoambiguity, the chapter asserts that Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather, and J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K portray the ambivalence characterizing the process of meeting the sometimes competing demands for agricultural progress and environmental sustainability in their Southern African contexts. My reading captures the ambiguities that emerge as Lessing’s Dick, Head’s Gilbert, and Coetzee’s Michael pursue their agricultural ventures while trying to maintain an ecological balance.
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