Rethinking African Ecocriticism Beyond Regional Boundaries: Corporate Capitalism, Global Periphery and Subalternity in Nigerian Novels

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the epistemological grounding of African ecocriticism and the semantic knowledge of the label in global and Africa-centred eco-critical discourse. Drawing on important insights associated with postcolonial (eco-critical) theory, it contends that the label triggers local-global dichotomy and crises of taxonomy, identity and belonging, since it arguably constructs the image of otherness for environmental criticism in Africa. We argue that the physical world is a composite of ecosystems, hence the label is seemingly misleading, constricting, and indicts African agency in the inferiorisation of its knowledge production. The eco-poetics of two Nigerian writers is equally analysed, focalising the subtexts of corporate capitalism and how life-forms in Africa interconnect with the rest of the world. We submit that the activities of corporate powers reinforce their primordial conception of postcolonial society as the global periphery propitious for primitive accumulation at the expense of the environment and Indigenous rights.