Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa (review)

As the first full-length ecocritical study on Africa, Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa (2011), a collective volume edited by Byron Caminero-Santangelo and Garth Myers, is a groundbreaking intervention into African, postcolonial, literary, and environmental studies. Recent scholarship on environmental justice and postcolonial ecocriticism have all questioned a seemingly first-wave Anglo-American ecocriticism’s historical erasure in focusing on “nature in a relatively pure state and/or on natural forms of belonging” (4).¹ Echoing the revisionist ecocritical methodologies that systematically undo binaries separating “ecology and politics, environment and ideology,” Environment at the Margins, too, advocates for a stronger sensitivity to social and environmental justice concerns through alternative epistemologies of nature, landscape, progress, and development (229). The collection’s specific geographic focus encodes ecocritical concerns through wide-ranging issues like food sovereignty, waste and wildlife management, deforestation, soil erosion, and/or the nefarious consequences of ignoring slow-moving environmental calamities that aren’t bolstered by the spectacular. Moreover, the volume espouses a multidisciplinary approach to unveil the “political unconscious” of a literary artifact’s “environmental unconscious” (to borrow from Lawrence Buell) by foregrounding both the constructive and destructive potential of representation and spatial imaginaries (229). In other words, the essays here examine closely “the transformation of existing tropes, genres, and concepts (including ecocritical concepts) or the significance of suppressed environmental epistemologies for reimagining development, environmental protection, sustainability, and relationships between humans and nonhuman nature toward the goal of forging a better future for Africa” (6).

By delimiting the transnational scope of postcolonial ecocriticism to an African ecocriticism, the essays further underline the pressing issue of environmental governance in the continent where “localized problems too are often shaped by global factors that are difficult for many Africans to address, in particular the shaping of local, cultural, and economic conditions by the legacies of colonialism and (neo)imperial capital” (9). In its effort to bring African literary and environmental studies into a fervent interdisciplinary dialogue, the volume assembles scholars from a range of disciplines (like history, geography, anthropology, literature, and urban, international, African, and global studies) yet conscientiously eschews espousing a single “critical vantage point”—be it the Northern environmentalism of the affluent or postcolonialism’s penchant for post-structuralism (10). What results then is an innovative collage of environmental texts and visions from varied spatiotemporal contexts across the continent that include imperialist travel, hunting, or historic narratives (Garth Myers, Roderick Neumann, and Jane Carruthers), colonial pastorals (David McDermott Hughes), oral traditions of Maasai environmental dialogue (Mara Goldman), fictional works by acclaimed African writers like Mia Couto, Ben Okri, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Zakes Mda (Amanda Hammar, Jonathan Highfield, Anthony Vital, Byron Caminero-Santangelo, and Laura Wright), or the memoir of Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai (Rob Nixon), among others.

Yet in its recurrent plea to contest the marginalizing environmental imaginations of an Edenic Africa, the volume’s introduction admits to prioritizing an anglophone corpus with a stronger focus on white African writing (13). If not in the essays per se, the collection’s staunchly interdisciplinary stance would have benefitted from briefly redressing its limits in the introduction. In other words, a study on Africa with its commitment to understanding the environment at the margins could have engaged a little with an oft-marginalized Africa of the Indian Ocean islands and, in its spirit of dialogue, an African diasporic space of the Caribbean islands as their rich, pioneering ecocritical contribution dating back to colonial times are already redefining the contested boundaries and genealogies of both an American and postcolonial ecocriticism.²