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.
Innehållsförteckning
Chapter 1 ‘Here is some baobab leaf!’: Sunjata, Foodways and biopiracy – Jonathan Bishop Highfield
Chapter 2 Shona as a land-based nature-culture: A study of the (re)construction of Shona land mythology in popular songs – Mickias Musiyiwa
Chapter 3 The environment as significant other: The green nature of Shona indigenous religion – Jacob Mapara
Chapter 4 Animal oral praise poetry and the Samburu desire to survive – James Maina Wachira
Chapter 5 The paradoxes of voluntourism: Strategic visual tropes of the natural on South African voluntourism websites –
Reinier J. M. Vriend
Chapter 6 Towards an ecocriticism in Africa: Literary aesthetics in African environmental literature – Chengyi Coral Wu
Chapter 7 Critical intersections: Ecocriticism, globalised cities and African narrati ve, with a focus on K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents – Anthony Vital
Chapter 8 Navigating Gariep country: Writing nature – culture in Borderline by William Dicey – Mathilda Slabbert
Chapter 9 Negotiating identity in a vanishing geography: Home, environment and displacement in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water – Ogaga Okuyade
Chapter 10 Human masks? Animal narrators in Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle and Alain Mabanckou’s Memoirs of a Porcupine – Wendy Woodward
Chapter 11 Nature, animism and humanity in anglophone Nigerian poetry – Sule Emmanuel Egya
Chapter 12 Animals, nostalgia and Zimbabwe’s rural landscape in the poetry of Chenjerai Hove and Musaemura Zimunya – Syned Mthatiwa
Om författaren
Chengyi Coral Wu is a Ph D candidate in English at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA.
Fler e-böcker från samma författare (r) / Redaktör
936 E-böcker i denna kategori
