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University of Nevada, Reno Return of the Pre-Colonial Environment University of Nevada, Reno Return of the Pre-Colonial Environment? Land Questions and the Environmental Imagination of Nationhood in Southern African Literature A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English By Frank Merksamer Dr. Jen Hill / Dissertation Advisor December, 2019 THE GRADUATE SCHOOL We recommend that the dissertation prepared under our supervision by Entitled be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of , Advisor , Committee Member , Comm ittee Member , Committee Member , Graduate School Representative David W. Zeh, Ph.D., Dean, Graduate School i Abstract As historical and sociological studies of land questions multiply across Southern Africa, the possibilities for thinking about the literary imagination of Southern African environments expand. Thinking about changing governmental conceptions of land ownership and land usage, sociologist Ruth Hall argues that an expansive land question is a question of “how our cities and rural areas can look different” (Interview). Her words belie analytic connections between urban migration and land discourse, linking two, often diametrically opposed spaces. Land questions form political bases and lead to paradigmatic shifts. As Southern African literature responds to land questions and their potential for widespread change, such literature participates in contests over “environment,” squaring developmental and community concepts, urging epistemic reevaluation. I argue that selected Southern African literatures take on what I consider to be an environmental imagination of nationhood. They do this precisely by engaging schisms between governmental and popular conceptions of land. ii Table of Contents Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 Chapter One ...........................................................................................................32 Chapter Two...........................................................................................................66 Chapter Three.......................................................................................................107 Chapter Four ........................................................................................................140 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................175 Notes ....................................................................................................................187 Works Cited .........................................................................................................197 1 Introduction Defining the postcolonial nation and its cultural legacy in Southern Africa is a difficult process. On the one hand, migration and cultural contact complicate ethnic notions of “nation.” Regional migrations during the nineteenth-century Mfecane responded to colonial incursion and created many of the modern ethnic and political boundaries for Southern African nation-states. Post-independence Southern African states wrestle with a range of political contradictions including ethnic unrest and conflicts between precolonial and colonial legacies. Yet in addition to the ways in which migration and cultural contact have shaped the Southern African nation, the literary imagination can help reformulate social relations. By this I mean that literature sometimes acts as what historian Benedict Anderson calls an imagined community. Competing political imaginaries emerge in Southern African governmental documentation as well as in all manner of literature, which in this study expand upon the novel that Anderson primarily focuses upon to also include poems and plays. The Southern African literary imagination can dispute and complicate meanings for the nation, notably in terms of the ways in which a national imagination relies upon questions of access to and usage of land, also known as land questions. As Southern African literature helps to reimagine the nation in terms of land questions, it shapes social and cultural contests that in turn shape access, for millions of Southern Africans, to not only material security but to cultural relevance. Looking to land questions, questions of land usage and ownership, we might reformulate debates within postcolonial studies over the validity of “nation.” Many postcolonialists have rightfully been weary of “nation” because of the ways in which nationalist discourse handles difference. As one influential example, Gayatri Spivak’s 2 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” poses the problem of Indian nationalist discourse that translates the suicide of a woman. In deploying the woman’s suicide in the service of national discourse building, Spivak argues, the state appropriates cultural difference, doing epistemic violence to it. The problem of the state’s speaking for subaltern political subjects relates, adds weight to what other postcolonialists have interpreted as the trend of post-independence nations towards ultra-nationalism, neo-paternalism, and neo- colonialism. However much the postcolonial state uses or ignores cultural difference in the naturalization of its rule, conflicts of governance do exist and do echo through the literature of a nation. The representational strategies of Southern African literature raise epistemic conflicts over “land” and “nation” as well as the relationship between the two. That such conflicts mirror and enable reconsideration of philosophical divides within national governance allows us to reevaluate postcolonial critic Neil Lazarus’s defense of a critical nationalism. Bolstering a growing number of postcolonialists who do so1, Lazarus argues the potential in the nationalist writings of Franz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral for something quite responsive to cultural difference despite the potential for violence, epistemic and physical. Such potential props Lazarus’s advocacy for an “African nationalism” and ultimately a more generalized form of nationalism that can be critical of itself and engaged in dialectical relationships between national leadership and diverse groups of people (84). In addition to the connections that Lazarus uses Fanon and Cabral to build between what historians study as modernizing and traditionalist factions within postcolonial states2, literary land questions in Southern Africa also promote dialectical connections between ethnic imaginaries, national and transnational political frameworks, and ongoing social movements. Through often geographically complex 3 schema that map to layers of national identity, literary land questions engage and reformulate local and global notions of political practice. This study intervenes, from a postcolonial-ecocritical perspective, into the undertheorized potential of literary land questions to shape the “nation” as an environmentally significant entity. Postcolonial-ecocritic Rob Nixon influenced the scope of the field by rewiring tensions and overlaps between postcolonial and ecocritical studies. One of Nixon’s central arguments, which draws upon historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s strategies of provincializing history in order to work against Euro-centric tendencies towards the universal, is that ecocriticism has the potential to treat environments in universal, ahistorical terms, which work against the historical contextualizing in which postcolonialism is so invested (236). Because place-based thinking can create powerful environmental advocacy but risks awareness of political responsibilities beyond an immediate region (239), and political frameworks of transnationalism can attend the forces of Diaspora and shared postcoloniality but risk abstracting away unique experiences of places and environments (236), Nixon advocates an intersection of the two modes of thinking that produces what he calls a “transnational ethics of place” (245). Relative to Nixon’s mapping, postcolonial-ecocritical studies define ethical concern for the environment and for environmental communities by attending unique interactions between universalizing and “provincializing” dynamics. Sharing Nixon’s investments, this study argues that the literary imagination of land questions can galvanize widespread concern for natural environments by encouraging the reevaluation of relationships to land at multiple levels of interaction, from the government, to the local community, to the nation, to the region, and finally more 4 globally. Repeating patterns of struggle over land emerge in the darkly comic contrasts of magical realist landscapes or in the complexities of gendered representations for environmental belonging. Such representations harness similarities in pre-colonial and colonial histories and thus enable political reconsideration and reformulation of transnational political influences including the Bretton Woods institutions and the Southern African Development Corporation. As reimagined by Southern African literature, land questions can drive or combat human Diaspora, urban growth, sweeping material precarity, environmental degradation, conflict over environmental resources, and more generally participate in economic shifts at all scales. Reading Southern African literary imaginations of land questions thus provincializes “the nation” as a unit of decision making and conflict resolution that interacts with larger economic and social influences while engaging specific, local language for a sense of belonging to the lands and environments
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