Environmental Entanglements: African Literature’s Ecological Imaginary

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.

Kirk B. Sides is Assistant Professor of English and Affiliate Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a Research Affiliate with the Wits Center for Diversity Studies (WiCDS) at the University of Witswatersrand, Johannesburg. After receiving his PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA, Kirk was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand’s Institute for Social and Economic Research. He has published on African literatures and the environment in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, and Critical Philosophy of Race. Kirk has been a Visiting Scholar in the Humanities Institute at The Pennsylvania State University, as well as a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich.