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 takes a step back beyond the mid-twentieth century moment of political independence. Using ‘entanglement’ to represent ecological relations, the book traces an ecological imaginary that animates African literary and cultural repertoires. This imaginary gives shape to stories of crossing colonial and apartheid boundaries, of the movement of peoples, and of the cultural and social relations inscribed upon land. Focusing on literary and filmic texts, from 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 relations ecologically is not a belated preoccupation in African literatures; 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 African futurism and speculative fiction are part of a history of thinking the future through ecological form in African literatures.