Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology

Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology BY BYRON CAMINERO-SANTANGELO Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2014. x + 214 pp. 9780813936062 paper.

As the first published monograph on African environmental literature, Byron Caminero-Santangelo's Different Shades of Green is an important intervention into the thriving field of postcolonial ecocriticism. Building on his earlier coedited essay collection, Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa (2011), this interdisciplinary work draws on political ecology, environmental history, and environmental activism in order to provide a timely new assessment of the depth and breadth of environmental engagement in African letters.

Caminero-Santangelo's project raises two key questions, both of which he answers with clarity and conviction. The first queries whether ecocriticism offers a viable framework for the exposition of African literature, given the field's longstanding affiliation with Western environmentalisms that have tended to idealize an untouched nature at the expense of acknowledging the mutually shaping forces of indigenous peoples, colonial conquest, migration, and globalization. Conscious of this precedent, Caminero-Santangelo's first chapter on "The Nature of Africa"...