Dystopian Ecologies: Thinking about South African Ecocriticism through a Comparative Reading of Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Green Lion and Alettie van den Heever’s Stof [Dust

Abstract

Summary This article explores the notion of a South African ecocriticism by firstly placing it against the background of the ongoing debates about the relationship between postcolonialism and ecocriticism and secondly by situating it within the context of African ecocriticism. It points out the most important characteristics of South African ecocriticism, focusing on the impact of South Africa’s colonial history on environmental matters, the subsequent entanglement of environmental with social matters as well as the country’s linguistic and cultural diversity. The “dynamism and contingency” (Wylie 2006: 266) typical of South African ecocriticism is further considered by a comparative reading of two recent South African novels that present dystopian views of a future environment, Henrietta Rose-Innes’s English novel Green Lion (2015), which deals with animal extinction, and Alettie van den Heever’s Afrikaans novel Stof [Dust] (2018), which focuses on plant extinction.