Ecocritical Concerns in Select Afrikaans Narrative Works: Critical Perspectives

Abstract

Environmentally oriented literary and cultural studies, or ecocriticism for short, gained traction in the United States of America in the late 1980s. It took root in South Africa no earlier than the start of this century and has been applied to the field of Afrikaans literature only for about the last decade. At a conference in Nijmegen in 2010, the leading German ecocritic Axel Goodbody expressed concern about the slow spread of ecocriticism to non-Anglophone literatures. He highlighted the debilitating effect of the hegemony of English as medium of communication on practising ecocriticism. Goodbody warned that ecocritic debates would be poorer if they neglect the resources of theorising and critical analyses in non-English-speaking language and other contexts; and cultures that are not dominated by Anglophone traditions. Afrikaans has been part of the surge of different national voices and languages in this field. This article enters the debate about the expansion of ecocritical studies to include a more environmentally oriented world of research than the one dominated by Anglophone literatures for quite a few decades. It offers a critical-descriptive overview of how ecocritical studies centred on Afrikaans literary narratives add nuances to and amplify thematic matters of interest for ecocriticism in our country. I want to highlight the diverse and convincing contributions made by Afrikaans literary critics to “the understanding of the human relationship to the planet” (Joni Adamson & Scott Slovic, 2009: 6). These contributions are analysed in order to also evaluate the relevance of the various theoretical angles of approach in use, regarded within the broader theoretical discourse of ecocriticism.