Re-Figuring Mountains: Constructing Pathways to Inclusive Environmental Citizenship in South Africa

This article traces the historical and conceptual development of mountain figurations within the European social imaginary, exploring how mountains are not only physical terrains but also symbolic and rhetorical sites. Using the analytic of figurations from new materialism, the article demonstrates how mountains become subordinate to the political and discursive functions that they perform within a collective. In particular, it examines how the Romantic sublime and picturesque traditions transformed mountains from perceived sites of danger and desolation into elevated spaces of transcendence, creativity, identity formation and ecological aesthetic value. The analysis begins with the master narrative of ‘mountain gloom’ to ‘mountain glory’, as articulated by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, and it traces how Romantic poets, scientific alpinists and mountaineers embedded mountains within discourses of national identity, exploration and individual enlightenment. These figurations not only influenced environmental aesthetics but also prefigured conservation movements in Europe and North America, particularly through figures such as William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir.