Accepted Conference Paper
Lagos Studies Association Conference (LSA@10) · 2026
Abstract
African Studies in the twenty-first century confronts an escalating environmental crisis shaped by colonial histories and contemporary regimes of global extraction. Oil exploitation, land dispossession, climate-induced displacement, and ecological violence increasingly define social and political life across the continent. Yet environmental questions have often remained peripheral within African Studies, overshadowed by dominant emphases on nationalism, identity, and political economy. This paper argues that the environmental crisis requires a rethinking of African Studies and positions postcolonial ecocriticism as a critical framework for responding to this urgency.
African literary engagements with ecological devastation reveal how environmental harm functions as an extension of colonial domination and neoliberal exploitation. Contemporary African environmental narratives illuminate the entanglement of land, ecology, and community with histories of dispossession, resistance, and survival. These works demonstrate that literature does more than represent ecological crisis; it articulates ethical claims, collective memory, and forms of ecological responsibility that challenge extractive logics.
The paper contends that African Studies must integrate environmental humanities more centrally in order to remain responsive to present realities. Postcolonial ecocriticism offers a framework attentive to power, history, and ecology, enabling African Studies to connect environmental crisis to questions of justice, sovereignty, and uneven vulnerability. An ecologically attentive African Studies recognizes environmental degradation not as a marginal concern but as a central analytic through which contemporary African conditions can be understood. The paper ultimately calls for a reorientation of African Studies that acknowledges ecological crisis as foundational to the field’s future.