Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Humanities — Language & Literature — African & Middle Eastern

Caminero-Santangelo (English and environmental studies, Univ. of Kansas) advances his increasingly important research in African environmental justice and postcolonialism with this well-written and enlightened literary study of modern African environmental narratives.  An important adjunct to the author's first-of-its-kind collection of interdisciplinary essays on African ecologies (Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa, coedited with Garth Myers, 2011),Different Shades of Green demonstrates how the present nature of Africa emerged from imperialist and environmentalist motives previously shaped by pastoral hegemonies.  Redefining Africa entails utilizing global discourse in efforts toward environmental justice and moral political ecology while distinguishing differences among its geographical scalesregion, nation, and bio-region.  Ecofeminism in East Africa, environmental justice in South Africa, and petro-capitalism in the Niger Delta, for example, require both global and local consideration.  The author juxtaposes regional and national narratives by such authors as Wangari Maathai, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Tanure Ojaide, and Nuruddin Farah with earlier environmental narratives by Alan Paton, Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, and others.  Analyses such as these address the ongoing disjunction between old and new views of the exploited continent.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.

This work first appeared in French (2006), and an English translation is most welcome.  Garnier (Univ. Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, France) states that his goal is to offer "a new political reading of the development of the Swahili novel over more than half a century by building on the propositions of 'minor literature' that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari ... used in their critiques of Franz Kafka's work."  Garnier provides a broad, informative overview of Swahili fiction, paying special attention to key writersShaaban Robert, Muhammed Said Abdulla, Euphrase Kezilahabi, Mohamed Suleiman, and Said Ahmed Mohamed.  Chapters treat genres and topics in the Swahili literary tradition.  Two chapters merit particular mention: one explores fiction on corruption in postcolonial society; the other looks at the deployment of the detective novel.  The author has a light touch in terms of the apparatus of theory, which he uses to look at the tradition as a whole, and he provides both the English and the Swahili for the quotations he includesa helpful decision.  The fine bibliography includes all the authors discussed (more than 100) as well as the considerable literary criticism that Garnier consulted.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates through faculty.