The discourse of ecological proximity in The Famished Road and Wizard of the Crow: A postcolonial ecocritical analysis

Abstract

This study explicates the discourse of ecological proximity embedded in two postcolonial African novels. It employed ecocritical theory informed by posthumanism, ‘aesthetics of proximity’ (Iheka, 2018) and postcolonial ecocriticism as critical venture to undertake analysis. The novels targeted in the study, The Famished Road, and Wizard of the Crow, were purposely selected owing to their thematic preoccupation and stylistic convergence pertinent to proximity of ecological entities. The study reveals that both novels present discourses that critique hierarchy in the relationship among ecological entities and promote harmonious interaction. The proximity discourses are revealed through foregrounding ecological diversity in portrayal of settings, depicting harmony in interspecies interaction, conferring power of agency to the nonhuman entities, and through blurring anthropocentric boundaries. Through distributing agency to non-human nature and endowing human figures the capacity to step out of anthropocentric confines, the novelists have foregrounded a discourse of proximity among ecological entities in their narratives.

Keywords

• Ecological proximity
• Posthumanism
• Ecocriticism
• Postcolonial novels
• Discourse