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 structure 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 intensifying ecological crisis requires a critical rethinking of African Studies and positions postcolonial ecocriticism as a critical framework for responding to this urgency.
Through readings of Helon Habila’s Oil on Water and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were, this paper examines how African literary texts illuminate the entanglement of land, ecology, and community with histories of dispossession, resistance, and survival. These works reveal how environmental harm functions as an extension of colonial domination and neoliberal extraction while also foregrounding ethical claims, collective memory, and forms of ecological responsibility that challenge extractive logics. African literature, the paper argues, does more than represent ecological crisis; it produces critical ways of imagining human–environment relations under conditions of ecological instability.
The paper contends that African Studies must integrate the environmental humanities more centrally to remain responsive to contemporary realities. Postcolonial ecocriticism offers a framework attentive to the intersections of power, history, and ecology, enabling African Studies to connect environmental crisis to questions of justice, sovereignty, and uneven vulnerability. An ecologically attentive African Studies recognises environmental degradation not as a marginal concern but as a central analytic through which contemporary African conditions can be understood. Ultimately, the paper calls for a reorientation of African Studies that acknowledges ecological crisis as foundational to the field’s intellectual and political future.
Keywords
African Studies; Postcolonial Ecocriticism; Environmental Humanities; Ecological Crisis; Extractivism; Environmental Justice; African Literature; Land and Memory; Ecological Instability; Global South
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