Ecological Disruption: Reading the African Environment with Collage Art Restricted; Files Only
Vessier, Ninon Julie Yasmina (Spring 2024)
Published
Abstract
Ecological Disruption: Reading the African Environment with Collage Art investigates how collage art offers new ecocritical interpretations of African literature. With a pluri-disciplinary approach, Ecological Disruption exposes how ecologies respond to colonial and exploitive forces in twentieth-century African literature written in French and collage art. Combining literary and art, I reread literature from Morocco, Algeria, Senegal, and Congo through collages from the African continent to reveal the overlooked ways in which sea, earth, and stone fight back against anthropogenic violence.
Collage art cuts up, (re)shapes, and juxtaposes matter. Likewise, my project develops a fragmented, layered reading approach to move beyond traditional interpretations of the African environment in literature. Inspired by the decentering gesture inherent to collage art, my project dismantles anthropocentric categories of human and nonhuman to uncover thriving and vibrant ecologies. Through their composite structure—photographs, paper, fabric, glitter—collages disrupt homogeneous perceptions of matter. Their heterogeneity galvanizes my textual analyses of (re)active, pluri-dimensional environments. My first chapter studies Khadim Bamba’s knitted collages, inspired by the Senegalese craft ndiakhass, to illuminate interwoven human and nonhuman beings in Birago Diop’s and Taos Amrouche’s stories. Chapter two turns to Rahma Naili’s collage “Autoportrait”, inspired by the nonhuman, to interpret ecologies of migration in the poems of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine. In chapter three, Wangechi Mutu’s multi-composite collage on the female sea creature nguva centers my reading of Tchicaya U Tam’si’s Les Méduses
on jellyfish blooms and female resistance during the construction of the railway Congo-Océan. Kader Attia’s layered collages on stone memory illuminate my reading of Mohammed Dib and Assia Djebar’s mineral memory in the context of colonial violence in Algeria in chapter four. In the last chapter, Wangechi Mutu’s glittery collages on extraction guide my interpretation of petroleum agency that resists the tyranny of extraction in Sony Labou Tansi’s play
Je, soussigné cardiaque.
Reading texts via the hermeneutic of collage art opens onto an ecocritical methodology that seeks out underestimated ecological responses. This collage reading lens, I argue, decenters our human gaze on the environment and veers away from Eurocentric conceptions that reduce African ecosystems to their colonial archetypes. In this way, Ecological Disruption follows collage art’s radical reordering of matter to burst, unearth, and generate new interpretations of African ecologies.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Woven Ecologies : Reading Birago Diop’s Les Contes D’amadou Koumba and Taos Amrouche’s Le Grain Magique
Chapter 2: Ecologies of Migration in Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine Soleil Arachnide and Rahma Naili’s Autoportrait
Chapter 3 : Tidal Rebellion: Jellyfish in Tchicaya U Tam’si’s Les Meduses Ou Les Orties De Mer
Chapter 4 : Mineral Repair in Mohammed Dib’s Qui Se Souvient De La Mer And Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, La Fantasia
Chapter 5: Following The Black Tide: Petroleum in Je, Soussigné Cardiaque By Sony Labou Tansi And Collages of Wangechi Mutu
Bibliography
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File download under embargo until 22 May 2030 | 2024-04-05 18:07:37 -0400 | File download under embargo until 22 May 2030 |
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