Natures of Africa. Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms (Fiona Moolla)

Abstract

Temperatures that beat all records, climate refugees, farmlands desertified, polar ice melt, people from the Marshall Islands writing poems about submergence, terrible pollution of earth water and air, deep forests denuded, mountains of waste on land and in the sea ... [...]it is our practice to ask questions, to ponder forms of representation, and to look carefully at what is left unsaid. [...]her superb introduction is almost reason enough on its own to buy the book: a very thorough and helpful survey of the emerging territory of African ecocriticism, followed by some brilliant open-ended questions that remain as a catalyst for future work, and an incisive reflection on each chapter. In other chapters: adolescent boys from the Samburu community in Kenya sing praise poems to the ostrich, while other people sing to elephants, and no animal is referred to as "wild"; the advertising strategies of volontourism use "nature" in "a binary structure of meaning" to essentialise Africa, and favour the rural over the urban, and the natural over the industrial; a travel narrative from South Africa invokes "the interrelatedness of all things", and demonstrates the links between regionalist concerns and transnational histories "of displacement and global environmental injustices" (Slabbert 164); a novel about the disastrous ecosocial impact of crude oil extraction in the Niger Delta shows how "the relationship between the natural and the social [...] arguably, becomes the cardinal principle in the process of people's identity formation" (Okuyade 189); two novels from the Cameroon and the Congo have animal narrators (a politically aware dog and a literate porcupine) that subvert the habitual human-animal binary, and offer "finally, subjects without fear of being mastered by a human" (Woodward 228); and in the last chapter, contemporary Anglophone Nigerian poetry uses a contemporary view of certain animist beliefs to embody 'the nature-culture interdependence' (Egya 231-49).