African Literary Aesthetics and Nature

Despite the literary transition from modernist to postmodernist canons such as eco-criticism, Western modernist scholarship pervades their theorization, which contradicts African perspectives on the ecological environment. While Western scholarship is based on binaries that present nature as a separate other, African thought elevates the ecological environment as equal or better than humankind. This book cross-examines the major tenets of eco-criticism to evaluate their relevance to African literature. Using postcolonial theory, the study interrogates contemporary tenets that dismiss as “homocentric” any literary works that adopt images from the ecological environment for aesthetic expression. The texts under study are Saadawi’s Love in the Kingdom of Oil, Amadi’s The Concubine, Ngugi’s The River Between, Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, poems from Mwanaka’s and Purifacacao’s Best “New” African Poets 2017 Anthology as well as selected works of African folklore such as proverbs, songs and oral narratives.

• By (author) Andrew Nyongesa