Natures of Africa

Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms

Buch | Softcover

288 Seiten

2016
Wits University Press (Verlag)
9781868149131 (ISBN)

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Environmental and animal studies are rapidly growing areas of interest across a number of disciplines. Natures of Africa is one of the first edited volumes which encompasses transdisciplinary approaches to a number of cultural forms, including fiction, non-fiction, oral expression and digital media. The volume features new research from East Africa and Zimbabwe, Nigeria and South Africa.

One of the first edited volumes to encompass transdisciplinary approaches to a number of cultural forms, including fiction, non-fiction, oral expression and digital media.
Environmental and animal studies are rapidly growing areas of interest across a number of disciplines. Natures of Africa is one of the first edited volumes which encompasses transdisciplinary approaches to a number of cultural forms, including fiction, non-fiction, oral expression and digital media. The volume features new research from East Africa and Zimbabwe, as well as the ecocritical and eco-activist 'powerhouses' of Nigeria and South Africa. The chapters engage one another conceptually and epistemologically without an enforced consensus of approach. In their conversation with dominant ideas about nature and animals, they reveal unexpected insights into forms of cultural expression of local communities in Africa. The analyses explore different apprehensions of the connections between humans, animals and the environment, and suggest alternative ways of addressing the challenges facing the continent. These include the problems of global warming, desertification, floods, animal extinctions and environmental destruction attendant upon fossil fuel extraction. There are few books that show how nature in Africa is represented, celebrated, mourned or commoditised. Natures of Africa weaves together studies of narratives - from folklore, travel writing, novels and popular songs - with the insights of poetry and contemporary reflections of Africa on the worldwide web. The chapters test disciplinary and conceptual boundaries, highlighting the ways in which the environmental concerns of African communities cannot be disentangled from social, cultural and political questions. This volume draws on and will appeal to scholars and teachers of oral tradition and indigenous cultures, literature, religion, sociology and anthropology, environmental and animal studies, as well as media and digital cultures in an African context.

F. Fiona Moolla is a Senior Lecturer and the Graduate Coordinator in the English Department at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa Byron Caminero-Santangelo is Professor of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Kansas. Sule Emmanuel Egya is Professor of African Literature and Cultural Studies and the Director of the Centre for Arts and Indigenous Studies at Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria. Jonathan Bishop Highfield is Professor of Literary Arts and Studies at Rhode Island School of Design.

Foreword
Chapter 1: “Here is some baobab leaf!”: Sunjata, foodways and biopiracy
Chapter 2: Shona as a land-based nature-culture: A study of the (re)construction of Shona land mythology in popular songs
Chapter 3: The environment as significant Other: The green nature of Shona indigenous religion
Chapter 4: Animal praise poetry and the Samburu desire to survive
Chapter 5: Voluntourism paradoxes: Strategic visual tropes of the natural on South African voluntourism websites
Chapter 6: Toward ecocriticism in Africa: Literary aesthetics in African environmental literature
Chapter 7: Critical intersections: Ecocriticism, globalised cities and African narrative, with a focus on K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents
Chapter 8: Navigating Gariep country: Writing nature and culture in Borderline by William Dicey
Chapter 9: Negotiating identity in a vanishing geography: Home, environment and displacement in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water
Chapter 10: Animal narrators in Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle and Alain Mabanckou’s Memoirs of a Porcupine
Chapter 11: Nature, animism and humanity in Anglophone Nigerian poetry
Chapter 12: Animals, nostalgia, and Zimbabwe’s rural landscape in the poetry of Chenjerai Hove and Musaemura Zimunya
About the Authors
Acknowledgements
Notes

Erscheinungsdatum	04.06.2016
Co-Autor	Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Sule Emmanuel Egya, Jonathon Bishop Highfield
Verlagsort	Johannesburg
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Ökologie / Naturschutz
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-13	9781868149131 / 9781868149131
Zustand	Neuware