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Postcolonial Ecocriticism and the Recovery of Hope: Okri, Dangarembga, and the Spiritual
John C. Hawley
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DOI:10.17265/2159-550X/2026.03.001
Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, USA
This essay stages a comparative ecocritical reading of African and transnational texts—Cajetan Iheka’s Naturalizing Africa, Ben Okri’s Every Leaf a Hallelujah, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body, Greg Sarris’s Becoming Story, and Karen Armstrong’s Sacred Nature—to examine how narrative re-situates the human within more-than-human worlds. Drawing on Iheka’s “aesthetics of proximity,” postcolonial theory, and critical posthumanism, it contrasts Okri’s hopeful, child-centered fable of multispecies reciprocity with Dangarembga’s portrayal of “slow violence,” psychic dispossession, and eco-touristic commodification in neoliberal Zimbabwe. Indigenous and spiritual frameworks in Sarris and Armstrong further disclose ancient precedents for posthuman ethics, foregrounding humility, ubuntu, and sacred kinship with land as counters to anthropocentrism and capitalist extraction. Across these works, the essay argues for a rehabilitated, accountable human—neither sovereign nor effaced—whose ethical regeneration depends on listening to nonhuman agencies and imagining decolonial, ecologically attuned futures.
ecocriticism, postcolonial ecology, critical posthumanism, ubuntu/relational ethics, slow violence
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