The project is concerned with the ecology of colonial resistance in African literature in European languages written in the 20th century. It is a cross-generic study of the selected work of, among others, Chinua Achebe, Okot p’Bitek, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Ebrahim N. Hussein, David Diop, Noemia de Sousa, and Bessie Head. To confront colonial discourses, these writers rely on indigenous ecology by foregrounding African natures and the intimate relations between humans and nonhumans. Showcased in their writings are inter-species relations, reverence for natural beings such as trees, waters, rocks, and animals, traditional ethics of environmental conservation, and communal codes of co-existence. In depicting these forms of indigenous ecology, the writers insist that the African traditional life, denigrated as savage by colonial discourses, can offer a lot in maintaining nonhuman-human harmony and planetary balance. Their ethics of representing African natures are, in the context of this project, described as decolonial ecology – the use of ecology to pursue the goal of decolonisation in a united yet fragmented world in which neo-colonialism appears to underscore forms of globalisation. The point is stressed that the world can benefit from the indigenous ecology of Africa in the context of neo-colonialism and ecological crises confronting it today. Environmental crises are local and local solutions are often the best for them. Moreover, with African traditional lifeways of human-nonhuman entanglements and inter-species co-existence, most environmental crises are prevented from even happening.
Prof. Sule Emmanuel Egya
Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai (Nigeria) | African Literature, Environmental Humanities
Sule Egya is professor of African Literature and Environmental Humanities at Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria. His research interests include literature and environment, African migration writing, knowledge production in Africa, and decolonial discourse. His current research examines environmental imagination in African 20th century literature. His monographs include:
Sule Egya has co-edited “Studies in Scientific and Cultural Ecology” (SevHage, 2021) and “Orality, Textuality, Society: New Perspectives on Nigerian Literature and Culture” (SevHage, 2023). He also writes fiction and poetry under the pen-name E. E. Sule. He is the author of the novels “Sterile Sky” (winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize Africa Region, 2013) and “Makwala” (ANA Prose Prize, 2019) and the poetry collection “What the Sea Told Me” (winner of the ANA Gabriel Okara Prize, 2009).
Prof. Patricia Plummer
University of Duisburg-Essen | English and Postcolonial Studies
E-mail: patricia.plummer@uni-due.de
Prof. Patricia Plummer
University of Duisburg-Essen | English and Postcolonial Studies
E-mail: patricia.plummer@uni-due.de
Patricia Plummer is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Anglophone Studies of the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her publications, research, and teaching focus on English literature and culture since the Long Eighteenth Century, Orientalism and travel writing, postcolonial literatures and gender studies as well as popular culture. She currently leads the project "Orientalism in Colonial Australia, 1770-1901: A Transimperial Perspective" (2022-2025) as part of the DFG-funded interdisciplinary research group "Ambiguity and Difference: Historical and Cultural Dynamics". Patricia Plummer has been visiting professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, (2019) and has held several research fellowships.
Website
https://www.uni-due.de/anglistik/postcolonial_studies/patricia_plummer.php