Different shades of green: African literature, environmental justice, and political ecology

Abstract

As the first published monograph on African environmental literature, Byron Caminero-Santangelo’s Different Shades of Green is an important intervention into the thriving field of postcolonial ecocriticism. Building on his earlier coedited essay collection, Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa (2011), this interdisciplinary work draws on political ecology, environmental history, and environmental activism in order to provide a timely new assessment of the depth and breadth of environmental engagement in African letters. Caminero-Santangelo’s project raises two key questions, both of which he answers with clarity and conviction. The first queries whether ecocriticism offers a viable framework for the exposition of African literature, given the field’s longstanding affiliation with Western environmentalisms that have tended to idealize an untouched nature at the expense of acknowledging the mutually shaping forces of indigenous peoples, colonial conquest, migration, and globalization. Conscious of this precedent, Caminero-Santangelo’s first chapter on “The Nature of Africa” usefully critiques the “environmentalism of the affluent” to be found in “settler pastorals” and travel writing by such authors as Karen Blixen, Elspeth Huxley, and Paul Theroux, whose privileging of wildlife conservation and landscape preservation is endorsed by many so-called “first-wave” ecocritics. In its place, he advocates an ecocritical framework that draws on political ecology in its insistence on the interconnectedness of environmental issues and political questions. This allows him to make a persuasive argument for a more inclusive definition of African environmental writing. Taking as “environmental earlier and more recent African writing that is outside or marginal to dominant notions of environmentalism,” Caminero-Santangelo effectively “challenge[s] hegemonic notions of what that term might mean” (30). If social struggles are inseparable from ecological transformations and vice versa, as he argues, then a wide range of African texts can be seen to develop an ecological sensibility, even those that do not provide an explicit or lengthy engagement with environmental concerns. For example, environmental degradation in Ngũgĩ’s A Grain of Wheat has often been read as a symbol of post-independence social decay. However, Caminero-Santangelo’s interdisciplinary framework suggests that the novel’s linkage of a seemingly anthropocentric concern with indigenous land rights to environmental problems such as soil erosion and infertility is more “historically and ecologically astute” than previously considered (52). Both emerge within the shared context of a harmful colonialism that degrades both Gĩkũyũ culture and local natural resources. By usefully expanding the scope of ecocriticism to include a broad array of African texts, Different Shades of Green raises a second question of scale that demands a methodological solution. How can postcolonial ecocriticism balance detailed analysis of local environmental concerns and their literary expression