Description
Book SynopsisExamines the theoretical framing of “nature” in South Africa and beyond. Analyzes myths and fantasies that have brought the world to a point of climate catastrophe and continue to shape the narratives through which it is understood.
Trade Review“Louise Green has compiled an important collection of analyses, focusing on the problem of nature in the age of climate change, and relating this to cultural circumstances in colonial and postcolonial Africa. These fascinating, well-researched, and surprisingly original studies show how nature is produced as a cultural relic in late capitalist society. Her book is an important contribution to the fields of Anthropocene studies, African studies, and cultural studies.”
—John Noyes,author of Herder: Aesthetics Against Imperialism
“What if the Anthropocene means the end of Third World futures, a shift from freedom to responsibility? In Fragments from the History of Loss, Louise Green shows how nature is produced as concept, commodity, and alibi for exploitation. With bracing nuance and salutary attention to inequality and immiseration, this scintillating book sifts through slices of time and fragments of nature in order to assemble shards of wisdom for living—lightly, with less—in the Anthropocene. An indispensable rejoinder to depoliticizing, universalist accounts of environmental crisis.”
—Jennifer Wenzel,author of The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature
“This brief but thought-provoking study challenges readers to view nature through a broad "constellation" . . . of historical and contemporary elements that illustrate the ways humans created a nature industry to reflect their interests rather than as something objectively natural.”
—A. S. MacKinnon Choice
“This book is an extraordinary curation of the relationship between the global nature industry and the postcolony. It embroiders seemingly unrelated moments and places them into a compelling whole, from the extinction of the mammoth and the ironies of a shopping bag promoting the plight of Africa’s wild dogs, to personal observations of queuing for water at Cape Town’s public fountain and the history of the Land Rover in South Africa.”
—Jasmin Kirkbride Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. The Nature Industry
2. Nature in Fragments
3. Living in the Subjunctive
4. The Primitive Accumulation of Nature
5. The Cult of the Wild
6. Privatizing Nature
7. Living at the End of Nature
Notes
References
Index
