South African Ecocriticism

Abstract

This essay surveys South African ecocriticism, scaling it alongside African and postcolonial ecocriticisms. The authors praise critics who use local specificities to disrupt the universalization of Euro-American environmental and ecocritical tenets. That disruption generates global relevance. However, the field is still overcoming imbalances toward white literary and critical voices, as well as a disarticulation of “animal-centered” from “people-centered” approaches. Animal studies and landscape have pulled South African ecocritics in two main directions, which this chapter maps. The authors then bolster arguments for reintegrating concerns about animals, land, and people, in the service of unpacking conservation’s links to race, colonialism, apartheid, and post-apartheid inequities. Novelist Zakes Mda stages the need for such reintegration in The Whale Caller, which reframes human-nonhuman relations and exposes the tourism economy’s disenfranchisement of both animals and people. (This article has been commissioned as a supplement to The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard.)