Ecological Trauma: Resource Extraction and Settler-Colonialism in African Literature

Intervening in debates across literary trauma theory and ecocriticism, this book argues that in an age increasingly defined by the impacts of anthropogenic climate change on society and ecology, it is necessary to graft the ethical concerns of trauma studies onto the lessons of ecocriticism, especially in the context of African literatures.

Drawing upon a corpus of African literary texts ranging temporally from 1950 to 2021 and geographically from Nigeria and Cameroon to South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, this book examines how ecological trauma is bound up in human systems of exchange, extraction, and domination. Each text portrays ecological trauma from a different geographical and historical perspective, but they all underscore the wide-ranging ecological and human costs of resource extraction and settler-colonialism across the African continent. Ultimately, this book explores the connections between human and nonhuman communities victimized by anthropogenic climate change and dissects the difficult relationships between land, ecology, and human influence.

This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in the fields of African literatures, the environmental humanities, trauma studies, and postcolonial studies, as well as all those interested in narrative in the Anthropocene.