Make live, make die, and let die: refusal to die in the terminal time of the Anthropocene

This thesis examines living conditions in a deathscape in ways that contribute to the more extensive discussion about life in the Anthropocene. Environmental issues like deforestation, pollution, and famine visible across the continent produce a compelling narrative of the visceral charge of enduring life in necropolitical sites of violence, displacement and resistance. Such sites become framed as deathscapes, a term Hugo Ka Canham uses to provoke a consideration of what it means to live with and despite ecological devastation and to reconsider survivance and freedom in blighted spaces. Contemporary African cultural texts effectively produce narratives of livingness that re-works the necropolitical governances of objectification. I argue that contemporary African cultural texts bear witness to the ongoing environmental catastrophe by documenting the material reality of deathscapes and exposing the living conditions of the ‘there’ that are framed as unimaginable. This analysis is established by close reading related to four genres: prose fiction, memoir, film and photography, in four African cultural texts: Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010), Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed (2006), Mora Kpai’s Arlit, Deuxième Paris (2005), Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (2009), Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo’s The Hell of Copper (2008) and Fabrice Monteiro’s The Prophecy (2013). My selected cultural texts depart from the limits of representing climate change as a distant crisis and instead make the crisis legible by inventing ways of how it may play out by passive/active postcolonial subjects who cannot and will not abandon the desire to live even when faced with a certain death. This analysis shows that for more than a decade now, writers and artists from across the African continent have been addressing the effects of environmental degradation in ways that illuminate the scale of devastation in the lived reality of their people while also providing nuanced representations of everyday coping mechanisms for surviving and even imagining a future beyond this devastation. Postcolonial African subjects’ resistance and determination for survivance in a deathscape offer a more accurate, situated and potentially optimistic responses to environmental crisis from an African perspective in the terminal times of the Anthropocene era.