Release Date: July 16, 2014
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Engaging important discussions about social conflict, environmental change, and imperialism in Africa, Different Shades of Green points to legacies of African environmental writing, often neglected as a result of critical perspectives shaped by dominant Western conceptions of nature and environmentalism. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework employing postcolonial studies, political ecology, environmental history, and writing by African environmental activists, Byron Caminero-Santangelo emphasizes connections within African environmental literature, highlighting how African writers have challenged unjust, ecologically destructive forms of imperial development and resource extraction.
Different Shades of Green also brings into dialogue a wide range of African creative writing—including works by Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Nuruddin Farah, Wangari Maathai, and Ken Saro-Wiwa—in order to explore vexing questions for those involved in the struggle for environmental justice, in the study of political ecology, and in the environmental humanities, urging continued imaginative thinking in effecting a more equitable, sustain¬able future in Africa.
Byron Caminero-Santangelo teaches English at the University of Kansas. He is co-editor (with Garth Myers) of Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa (2011) and author of African Fiction And Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality (2004).
Come on a journey with Africa's finest nature photographer to lands of time-honoured cultural traditions and unspoilt natural wilderness. Here is the 'real Africa' - astonishing in its diversity of wildlife, breathtaking in its natural beauty and unforgettable in its bursting floral kingdom. Evocative Africa is a visual journey taking the reader through Gerald Cubitt's selection of the 'unmissable' in sub-Saharan Africa. This extensive collection of images juxtaposes the scale and grandeur of the continent with an intimate attention to smaller, less obvious wonders. The informative commentary reveals the social, ecological and geographical context of the images. The book bursts with a multitude of images. The reader will be immersed in South Africa, will visit Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Botswana and Namibia. Just offshore, no lifetime's safari on the east coast of Africa can ignore Madagascar, perhaps the most compelling hotspot of biodiversity in the world. Four and a half years have gone into the design and preparation of this book and the endeavour of the photographer and publisher is to make Evocative Africa the best of its kind ever produced in South Africa: a book that captures the magic and character of the 'real Africa' - its timeless wildlife and wilderness, its colourful and proud ethnic heritage and, of course, its stunning diversity of landscape. It represents the culmination of many years of photographing Africa, her people, her places and her wildlife. It celebrates destinations we can all enjoy, showing them in a new light, giving us many moments of delight from places we already know to be astonishing.