Centering Decolonial and Environmental Counternarratives in Selected British, American, and African Literary Works

Abstract

This study engages with a selection of African, British, and American literary works that represent various spaces, histories, and positionalities. Some of these works are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), María Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902), Sophia Alice Callahan’s Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891), Mohamed Al-Fayturi’s Diwan Al-Fayturi (1979), and Yvonne Vera’s Nehanda (1994). In reading such texts, the study explores the representations of the different manifestations of othering as a normalized sociopolitical phenomenon and the otherers’ dominant narratives in the diverse contexts of these texts and how minoritized voices respond to and take to task such narratives. Drawing on the frameworks of decoloniality, postcolonial ecocriticism, and environmental justice, the study argues that the works it examines present decolonial/environmental counternarratives. These counternarratives question, critique, and challenge the dominant narratives and the imbalanced power structures built on them by centering othered voices and worldviews and underscoring the suppressive strategies and oppressive structures that result from such dominant narratives. The study’s utilization of such critical lenses to read a diverse group of literary texts can help illuminate how silencing the voices of marginalized communities is central to building and maintaining oppressive power structures, especially in colonial and settler-colonial contexts where normalized othering impacts not only the othered human, but also the nonhuman world. Moreover, the human other in such contexts is often considered a part of the environment that the colonizers aim to commodify and dominate. In this light, the study examines the texts’ representations of the ways in which centering dominant worldviews and imposing their narratives reinforce oppressive power structures rooted in ideologies such as Eurocentrism and anthropocentricism. This has also entailed decentering indigenous worldviews, which tend to give more space to the nonhuman and consider humans a part of the ecological system instead of believing in their superiority to the natural world. As such, centering decolonial and environmental counternarratives makes possible a multivocality that resists the silencing and oppression of both the human and nonhuman others.