Environmental Entanglements: African Literature’s Ecological Imaginary

Environmental Entanglements: African Literature’s Ecological Imaginary traces a long 
history of ecological thought in African literature.
Reading African literatures as environmental literatures, Environmental 
Entanglements takes a step back beyond the mid-twentieth century moment of political 
independence. Using ‘entanglement’ to represent ecological relations, the book traces 
an ecological imaginary that animates African literary and cultural repertoires. This 
imaginary gives shape to stories of crossing colonial and apartheid boundaries, of the 
movement of peoples, and of the cultural and social relations inscribed upon land.
 Focusing on literary and filmic texts, from writers such as Thomas Mofolo and Sol 
Plaatje in the early twentieth century to contemporary science and speculative fiction 
producers like Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu, Environmental Entanglements 
argues that cultural archives from the African continent display a history of ecological 
awareness that predates the moment of mid-twentieth century decolonization. The 
book is premised on the idea that imagining relations ecologically  is not a belated 
preoccupation in African literatures; rather, these early ecological imaginaries present 
an opportunity to delink notions such as environmentalism, ecology and ecocriticism 
from postcoloniality. Reading ecology as an animating, organizing trope in African 
literatures from at least the start of the twentieth century, the book offers a genealogy 
of the present, in which the increasingly popular  African futurism and speculative 
fiction are part of a history of thinking the future through ecological form in African 
literatures