Naturalizing Africa
Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature

This book analyzes how African literary texts have engaged with pressing ecological problems in Africa.

Cajetan Iheka (Author)

9781316648643, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 May 2019

223 pages
21 x 15.3 x 1.4 cm, 0.35 kg

'Iheka's Naturalizing Africa is a book that is uncanny in its prescience. Marshalling synthesizing a range of debates in environmental, animal, and African literary studies, it not only elaborates the grounds of current debates in these fields but also illuminates a pathway for what is to come. This is going to be of tremendous influence for a very long time.' Ato Quayson, Professor and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto

The problem of environmental degradation on the African continent is a severe one. In this book, Cajetan Iheka analyzes how African literary texts have engaged with pressing ecological problems in Africa, including the Niger Delta oil pollution in Nigeria, ecologies of war in Somalia, and animal abuses. Analyzing narratives by important African writers such as Amos Tutuola, Wangari Maathai, J. M. Coetzee, Bessie Head, and Ben Okri, Iheka challenges the tendency to focus primarily on humans in the conceptualization of environmental problems, and instead focuses on how African literature demonstrates the interconnection and 'proximity' of human and nonhuman beings. Through this, Iheka ultimately proposes a revision of the idea of agency based on human intentionality in African literary studies and postcolonialism: that texts yoke the exploitation of Africans to the despoliation of the environment, and they recommend responsibility toward human and nonhuman beings as crucial for ecological sustainability and addressing climate change.

Introduction: naturalizing Africa
1. African literature and the aesthetics of proximity
2. Beyond human agency: Nuruddin Farah and Somalia's ecologies of war
3. Rethinking postcolonial resistance: the Niger Delta example
4. Resistance from the ground: agriculture, gender, and manual labor
Epilogue: rehabilitating the human.

Subject Areas: African history [HBJH], Literary studies: post-colonial literature [DSBH5], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature & literary studies [D]