Douglas Eric Kaze

My research seeks to explore the depictions of urban environments in African poetry as a site of ecological interest. I plan to produce a series of articles that will focus respectively on poetic explorations of slum ecology in postcolonial cities, protest and urban ecology in apartheid South Africa and the ecology of diasporic/exile urban environments. Scholars of African and postcolonial literature have produced research works on the treatment of the environment in African literature, but not many of them have addressed African urban ecology. Most of them focus on rural environments, white South African nature writing and the petroleum problem in the Niger Delta. My work will address this using a theoretical framework be built on Felix Guattari’s idea of transversality, Garth Myer’s theory urban political environments (UPE) and Rob Nixon’s slow violence. I hope that this will contribute significantly to understanding the place of Africa in the global environmental crises.