Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice and Political Ecology by Byron Caminero-Santangelo (review)

Abstract

Byron Caminero-Santangelo. Different Shades of Green: Literature, Environmental Justice and Political Ecology. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2014. Pp. x, 214. US$27.50. Ecocriticism has always had an ambivalent relationship to literature. As Byron Caminero-Santangelo suggests in Different Shades of Green: Literature, Environmental Justice and Political Ecology, the continent has long been regarded as lacking traditions--a prejudice that colors the reception of many texts. Within ecocriticism, careful attention to writers is hard to find, while ecocriticism's place within literary studies is marginal at best. Different Shades of Green thus sets out to not only show the importance of ecocriticism to literary studies but also demonstrate how the study of literature can help us re-examine key assumptions about the of both and literary texts. As Caminero-Santangelo explains, an emphasis on the social and political aspects of problems, rather than on nature itself, distinguishes literature. African writing, he writes, tends to prioritize social justice; lived environments; livelihoods; and/ or the relationships among practice, representations of nature, power, and privilege (7). Many of the environmental texts Caminero-Santangelo explores are therefore less overtly concerned with the environment than one might expect--Wangarii Maathai and Ken Saro-Wiwa figure prominently here, but so do many figures less known to ecocriticism like Okot p'Bitek, Camara Laye, Ng[??]g[??] wa Thiong'o, and Chinua Achebe. If the inclusion of such writers seems unorthodox, that is precisely the point. By arguing for the ecocritical significance of the foregoing authors, Caminero-Santangelo intends to show how African literature can challenge dominant Western assumptions regarding environments and environmentalism and to interrogate widely accepted definitions of writing and the underlying constructions of and conservation embedded in them (4). Different Shades of Green therefore expands the canon and in many respects the boundaries of ecocriticism itself. For Caminero-Santangelo, ecocriticism in literature is not interested primarily in beautiful landscapes and charismatic megafauna but the social and political contexts that make up the environments with which his texts are concerned. However, Different Shades of Green is as much about the practice of ecocriticism in literary studies as about new ecocritical readings of texts. The notion of postcolonial regional becomes important for Caminero-Santangelo. As he explains, [a] regional focus need not result in a provincializing vision, a narrowing of concerns, or its own suppression of difference at smaller scales. While emphasizing regional alterity that cannot be subsumed by a more universal imperial or condition, ... regional particularism still challenges imperial discourse's suppression of global entanglement in the representation of difference. (9; emphasis in original) Different Shades of Green thus critiques imperialism from the perspective of literary and studies in order to show how attention to texts and contexts can help us think about problems on both local and global scales. Indeed, Caminero-Santangelo is concerned with not only how texts [bring] the local and the global together but also . …