Green roots: Recovering the 1992 AUETSA conference and the southern African origins of ecocriticism

Ecocriticism, the study of literature’s engagement with the environment, has reoriented literary studies towards questions of our ethical and imaginative relationship with the world. Glotfelty and Fromm’s The Ecocriticism Reader (1996) is widely considered to have formalised ecocriticism as a branch of literary studies in North America. Yet, as early as 1992, the Association of University English Teachers of Southern Africa (AUETSA) convened South Africa’s first literature conference with an environmental focus, themed ‘Literature, Nature and the Land: Ethics and Aesthetics of the Environment’. Drawing from Mbembe’s articulation of decolonisation as a project of re-centring African thought, this article conducts a historiographical analysis of the AUETSA conference and its proceedings, seeking to re-centre an overlooked African contribution within the history of ecocriticism. At this conference, scholars pushed the boundaries of higher education and literary criticism into new ‘green’ terrain. In doing so, they helped establish ecocritical inquiry in southern African literary studies when the movement was only beginning to take shape globally. Firstly, I examine the historiographical reception of the 1993 proceedings. Secondly, I undertake a retrospective analysis of several papers, examining how they anticipate key strands of contemporary ecocritical thought. Ultimately, this case demonstrates that the emergence of ecocriticism was not confined to the Global North but was developing concurrently in parts of the Global South. Contribution: This article contributes to debates about ecocriticism beyond the Global North. It recognises the pivotal role of the 1992 AUETSA conference and its proceedings as a visible moment of articulation for ecocriticism in the Global South.