1st Edition
Ecology, Decoloniality, and African Literature
Introduction: Ecology, Decoloniality, and African Literature
Goutam Karmakar and Deirdre C. Byrne
1. Ecology and Decoloniality: Reading the Natural World in Twentieth-Century African Literature
Sule Emmanuel Egya
2. Unfathomable Depths: “Deep Into Sacred Terrain” in Sir Ben Okri’s “The Secret Source” from Tiger Work (2023)
Rosemary Gray
3. Re-enchanted Bodies of Water: Towards a Decolonial Tidalectics in Recent African Fiction and Performance
Elisabeth Knittelfelder
4. An Eco-Decolonial Narrative: Toward a Dividual Self and Slow Wit(h)nessing in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea
Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim
5. The Weeping Earth: Entangled Humanism, Precarity, and Imaginaries in African Eco-Poetry
Emmanuel Adeniyi
6. Voices From the Fringes: The Eco-Poetics of Niger Delta Women
Kufre Friesenhan
7. On the Politics of Making Life in the Ruins of Empire: Helon Habila’s Oil on Water and Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities
Georgia Mandelou
8. Rekindling Eco-Ubuntu in Sicelo Mbatha’s Black Lion: Alive in the Wilderness
Beverley Jane Cornelius and Jean Rossmann
9. “Knowledge Born in the Struggle”: Activism, Decolonial Ecology, and Sustainability in Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed: A Memoir
Goutam Karmakar and Deirdre C. Byrne
Biography
Goutam Karmakar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad in India, with affiliations at the University of Cologne, Germany, and Durban University of Technology, South Africa. He has received prestigious fellowships including the Alexander von Humboldt and National Research Foundation awards. His research spans Global South literature, postcolonial studies, and environmental humanities. Karmakar edits the journal Global South Literary Studies and the Routledge book series South Asian Literature in Focus.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9119-9486
Deirdre C. Byrne is the Director of ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project), a practising poet, and a Professor of English Studies at the University of South Africa. She has published research on decolonizing poetry in education in South Africa in Education as Change and has published on black and white decolonial feminisms in The International Journal of Women’s Studies. She has published ecofeminist readings of speculative fiction in Extrapolation and a forthcoming article on trees as memory repositories in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in The Lion and the Unicorn.
