Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Adams and McShane; Adams, “Nature”; Anderson and Grove; Bienart, “Soil,” “African,” Rise; Brockington; Carruthers, “Nationhood,” Kruger; Fairhead and Leach; Ferguson, Anti-Politics; Hulme and Murphree; Leach and Mearns; Neumann, Imposing, Making. 2. Or, as William Beinart claims, “measuring change in terms of movement away from a pristine environment, and calling all change degradation, is of limited value. Human survival necessitates environmental disturbance, nor is nature in itself static” (Rise 390). Greg Garrard points out that many ecocritics also subscribe, mistakenly, to notions of ideal ecological equilibrium; he claims that even as contemporary ecology brings a static “balance of nature” model into question, “the association between biological diversity, ecosystem stability and an ideal, mature state of nature is an article of faith for most ecocritics and philosophers” (57). 3. The qualifier global marks an “expanded and diversified” conception of environmental justice not subsumed by a racial or nationally bound focus (Walker 2). 1 The Nature of Africa 1. O’Brien, “‘Back’”; Cilano and DeLoughrey; Vital, “Toward.” 2. As DeLoughrey and Handley point out, upholding “a sense of alterity while still engaging a global imaginary” requires “engaging local and often inassimilable aspects of culture and history” (28). 3. For ecocritical anthologies focused on Africa, see Okuyade; Caminero-Santangelo and Myers; and Wylie. 4. For overviews of American and British ecocriticism see Buell, Future; Garrard ; and Heise, “Hitchhiker’s.” 5. Cilano and DeLoughrey; DeLoughrey, Gosson, and Handley; DeLoughrey and Handley; Huggan; Huggan and Tiffin, “Green,” Postcolonial; Nixon, “Environmentalism ,” Slow; O’Brien, “Articulating”; Tiffin; Vital, “Situating,” “Toward”; Vital and Erney; L. Wright. 6. Cilano and DeLoughrey; Huggan and Tiffin, Postcolonial. 7. Nancy Stepan notes, “the transfer to natural history, geography, and anthropology of the political terminology of the eighteenth century—‘kingdom,’ ‘nation,’ ‘province,’ and ‘colonist’—indicates just how closely the notion of a distinctive tropical nature was tied to political empire” (17). 8. In an early article on ecocriticism and South African literary studies, Julia Martin noted the tension between “a definition of environmental priorities that 192 notes to pages 19–33 was perfectly in keeping with the . . . ​ colonial project” and the concerns of the “the majority of South Africans,” who would see such priorities as “irrelevant, and even inimical, to the struggle for social and political justice” (3, 1). In this context, she found striking “a rather uncritical focus on ‘nature writing’” in British and American ecocriticism and pondered if “opening the canon to other voices” might “subvert the genre’s fundamentals”: “Is the nature of Third World environments likely to produce the texts of wilderness, forests and the great outdoors with which we are familiar? I think of the difficulties of teaching Wordsworth to students from the townships” (4). 9. William Finnegan outlines the many limitations of The Shadow in the Sun in an impressive book review. 10. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has called Out of Africa “one of the most dangerous books ever written about” the continent and particularly abhors Blixen’s racist equation between Africans and animals (Moving 133). 11. As Simon Lewis puts it, “Karen Blixen is . . . ​ able to present her lifestyle on her farm in Africa as the acme of a kind of natural, or at least extrasocial, civilization ,” rather than as the product of (brutal) colonial processes (113). For the history of colonial dispossession and exploitation in Kenya, see Ward; Wolff; and Kanogo. 12. Of British heritage, Leakey was appointed head of Kenya’s Wildlife Conservation and Management Department in 1989 by Daniel Arap Moi. He “lobbied hard to have the elephant declared an endangered species” and was able to garner significant international financial support for Kenyan wildlife conservation (Bonner 132–33). Raymond Bonner surmises that part of his enormous reputation as a successful conservationist resulted from “the Western desire for a white hero” (133). 13. Adams and McShane; Brockington; Carruthers, “Nationhood,” Kruger; Hulme and Murphree; Neumann, Imposing, Making. 14. Anderson and Grove; Brockington; Carruthers, “Nationhood,” Kruger; Neu­mann, Imposing; Shetler. 15. Adams and McShane; Adams, “Nature”; Carruthers, “Nationhood,” Kruger; Hulme and Murphree; Neumann, Imposing, Making. 16. See Ribot and Oyono; Chabal. 17. See Derman, Odgaard, and Sjaastad; Hyden. 18. See also Bassett and Crummey. 19. Until recently, “within the English-speaking academy, the experiences of the USA, Australia and the UK have dominated discussion and theoretical development , albeit with important differences being identified between these countries ” (Williams and Mawdsley 660). 20. Walker claims that “as environmental justice globalizes, its initial meaning derived from the U.S. context is not simply reproduced, although...