The construction of natural agency: A material ecocriticism perspective on Istikhdām Al-Ḥayāh and Bilangan Fu

Material Ecocriticism shifts ecocritical attention from representing nature to the agency of matter. Yet, its secular ontology has seldom been tested on non-Western corpora in which the material and the spiritual are inseparable. No study has read an Arabic and an Indonesian novel together through this framework, so it remains unclear why material agency takes different ideological forms across Southern traditions. This descriptive-analytical qualitative study examines how Ahmad Naji’s Istikhdām al-Ḥayāh and Ayu Utami’s Bilangan Fu construct the agency of nature and its ideological orientation. Systematic close reading identified 31 excerpts in which non-human matter acts, remembers, or responds, 12 of which were analyzed through affinity studies and the concepts of storied matter, more-than-human agency, and vibrant matter. Both novels construct nature as an autonomous narrative agent that retains material memory and acts beyond human control. Ideologically, they diverge. Naji’s destructive-melancholic agency turns sand, stone, and an ailing Nile into archives of post-Arab Spring urban trauma, whereas Utami’s cosmological-dialogic agency makes limestone, wind, and fish partners in an ethics grounded in post-Reformasi Javanese spirituality. Tracking the political rupture of each setting, this divergence indicates that Material Ecocriticism needs a geo-historical dimension to explain why a shared ontology of matter yields opposed ecological imaginaries. Naji keeps religion as an external matter, while Utami locates spirit within stone and mountain, and this relationality exposes the secular limits of Bennett’s vibrant matter. The study proposes the destructive-melancholic and cosmological-dialogic typology as an analytical category for comparative Global South ecocriticism.