Ecological Trauma in Contemporary African Literature in English

Abstract My dissertation examines the ways in which authors across the African continent represent ecological trauma in literature. By productively combining the concerns of ecocriticism with the ethical engagement of literary trauma theory, I arrive at a way of reading for ecological trauma while proposing key tenets of a green trauma theory. The corpus of literary texts I explore in this dissertation spans from 1950 to 2021 and includes canonical works such as Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (2014 [1952]) and J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (2014 [1976]), more contemporary novels such as Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2022), and works of Africanfuturism such as Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2020). Ultimately, my dissertation is an argument in favour of the ability of literary language to articulate ecological trauma – or the disruption of an ecological system due to anthropogenic change driven by extraction, exploitation or expansion – across histories, geographies and communities.