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Project title

�Weathering the Anthropocene: Writing futurity in Contemporary African Cultural Texts.�

Primary Funding Agency

Irish Research Council

Co-Funding Organisation(s)

n/a

Lead Organisation

University of Limerick (UL)

Lead Applicant

n/a

Project Abstract

10.1 Climate change is a global crisis that has disproportionally affected African countries in a number of ways--morphological, economic, sociopolitical, and physical. The long history of violence and imbalanced exchanges between the West and Africa has compounded the reductive ways by which the impact of the environmental catastrophe in Africa is read and represented in the West, thus deepening the communication chasm between African ways of being and knowing and Western responses to the body of knowledge emerging from the African continent and the Global South at large. My thesis employs theoretical frameworks associated with the field of postcolonial studies to read the environmental crisis unfolding in Africa from an Africanist cultural perspective. For more than a decade now writers and artists from across the African continent have been addressing the effects of environmental degradation in ways that illuminate the scale of devastation in the lived reality of their people, while also providing nuanced representations of everyday coping mechanisms for surviving and even imagining a future beyond this devastation. In bearing witness to the overlooked or misunderstood environmental issues unfolding in the continent, these texts offer rich dialogues among environmental studies, postcolonial writing, and political philosophy on the topic of climate change and its impact not only for Africa and the Global South, but for the world at large. 10.2 My work reads cultural texts like fiction, autobiography, film, and photography to illuminate how contemporary Africanist artists address ongoing environmental issues like extractivism, drought and pollution in different regions across the African continent. By focusing on African cultural engagements with ecological catastrophe my thesis seeks to further current discussions about climate change by disrupting (�unimagining�) general and generic representations of said crisis and offer more accurate, situated and potentially optimistic responses to environmental crisis from an African perspective.

Grant Approved

�27,000.00

Research Hub

n/a

Research Theme

Climate Solutions, Transition Management and Opportunities

Start Date

01/09/2022

Initial Projected Completion Date

31/08/2023