Abstract

The Anthropocene has become a dominant framework for understanding planetary environmental change, yet its universalizing assumption that "humanity" bears equal responsibility for ecological crisis has been widely contested. Postcolonial and decolonial scholars argue that it obscures the roles of colonialism, racial capitalism, extractivism, and imperial knowledge systems in producing environmental inequalities.

This seminar argues that African environmental humanities offers not simply a regional response to these debates but an alternative framework for theorizing planetary environmental change. Across literature, oral traditions, philosophy, cultural practices, film, and other forms of cultural production, African writers and thinkers foreground the entanglements of land, memory, colonial violence, nonhuman life, spirituality, and environmental justice. Rather than treating ecological crisis as universal, African literary and cultural traditions expose its uneven histories while imagining relational, multispecies, and ethically grounded futures.

We invite papers that examine how African literature and culture reshape environmental humanities and comparative literature by engaging questions such as:

• How do African literature and cultural production challenge dominant narratives of the Anthropocene?
• How do colonialism, racial capitalism, slavery, and extractivism reshape planetary environmental change?
• What ecological philosophies emerge from African literary traditions and Indigenous knowledge systems?
• How do African writers represent relationships among humans, nonhuman beings, land, memory, and spirituality?
• How do African texts imagine environmental justice and alternative planetary futures?
• How can African environmental humanities contribute to decolonizing environmental theory and comparative literary studies?
• How do African environmental imaginaries compare with Indigenous and other Global South ecologies?
• What role can comparative literature play in rethinking the Anthropocene through histories of colonialism and ecological inequality?
• How do African narratives redefine climate justice, multispecies coexistence, and environmental ethics?
• What theoretical frameworks emerge when African environmental thought is recognized as a producer rather than merely an object of environmental humanities scholarship?

By positioning African environmental humanities as a generator of environmental theory, this seminar seeks to move beyond universalized narratives of environmental change toward historically grounded and globally comparative understandings of ecological justice and planetary futures.