This special issue examines the ways fiction and poetry engage with
environmental consciousness, and how African literary criticism
addresses the implications of global environmental transformations. Does
environmentalist literature offer new possibilities for critical
thinking about the future? What constitutes environmentalist fiction and
poetry? What kind of texts, themes and topics does climate writing
include? Does any text in which the environment features become
available to environmentalist criticism? In their engagement with the
diverse genres, themes and frameworks through which contemporary African
writers address topics including urbanisation, cross-species
communication, nature and climate change, contributors to this special
issue help to define African environmental writing. They look at the
literary strategies adopted by creative writers to convey the impact of
environmental transformation in narratives that are historically
informed by a century of colonialism, nationalist political activism,
urbanisation and postcolonial migration. How does environmental
literature intervene in these histories? Can creative writers, with
their powerfully post-human and cross-species imaginations, carry out
the ethical work demanded by contemporary climate science? From Tanure
Ojaide's and Helon Habila's attention to environmental decimation in the
Niger Delta through to Nnedi Okorafor's and Kofi Anyidoho's imaginative
cross-species encounters, the special issue asks how literature mediates
the specificities of climate change in an era of global capitalism and
technological transformation, and what the limits of creative writing
and literary criticism are as tools for discussing environmental
issues.
This volume also includes a Literary Supplement.
Guest Editors: Cajetan Iheka (Associate Professor of English, Yale
University) and Stephanie Newell (Professor of English, Yale
University)
Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu (Professor of Africana Studies at the
University of Michigan-Flint)
Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma (Fellow, Department of English University
of Central Florida)
