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So, the narrative of the domination of space and nature by humans is a patriarchal and masculine one. It sees relations of domination and hierarchical social systems as patriarchal and phallocentric, creating significant “others” such as women and non-human nature who are at the receiving end in this dialectic. Its main point of departure is the adoption of a gendered prism in its analysis of this dialectic. Social ecology as an environmental philosophy is particularly pertinent as a tool of analysis of Lessing's and Hove's texts, which are largely set in a colonial context where the teleology of domination of one human being by another is the main defining characteristic of human existence.Įcofeminism is related to social ecology in its location of the causes of human domination of nature in human relations of domination of one human being by another. It locates the causes of the same in human relations of domination: “The very notion of domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human” (Bookchin qtd in DesJardins 240). It represents a movement away from deep ecology's focus on philosophical causes to explain the current global environmental crisis. Social ecology is associated with the work of Murray Bookchin. So, deep ecology tries to promote an alternative ecocentric worldview to replace the current anthropocentric one that privileges humans over the environment, making it an appropriate tool for the analysis of the above texts, which also proffer alternatives to anthropocentricism.
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In this can be said to lie the roots of the domination and exploitation of the natural environment that is at the center of the current global environmental crisis. This human-centered or anthropocentric worldview also led to the development of “a mechanistic Cartesian metaphysics which sees nature as a dead, inert machine, insensitive to abuse and exploitation by humans” (Eckersley 45–46). In this Western thinking, nature is conceived as existing to serve human designs and becomes objectified in the process. Human civilization developed on this foundation, and particularly in the West, was conceived from a Social Darwinian perspective as progressing from lower forms to higher forms, as shown by the four stages of human social development in Adam Smith's seminal text The Wealth of Nations (qtd. In fact, as Edward Said puts it, “everything about human history is rooted in the earth” (5) since over time human beings have struggled and competed over geography and territory, conceptualizing the environment as space that needs to be turned into place (5). This thinking is traceable to the biblical story of creation in which humans are destined to control nature. Therefore, an analysis of these two texts, necessarily, has to rely on a triangulation of some of the most recent environmental philosophies, namely, deep ecology, social ecology, and ecofeminism.ĭeep ecology locates current environmental problems in the dominant Western philosophical outlook, which envisages humans as destined to dominate nature and control it. The setting of Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing (1950) and Chenjerai Hove's Ancestors (1996) in colonial Zimbabwe means that they, in one way or another, engage with the environmental ideologies of the (Western) colonizers and the (African) colonized. The paradox plays on human, particularly Western anxieties and ambivalences concerning relationships with the animal world and nature in general. However, in the context of the current global “environmental crisis” it is essential to “recover” the discourse on the natural environment in Zimbabwean literature.ĭiscourses on the relationship between humans and the environment have always mediated human consciousness in one way or the other, centering on people as part of nature or as masters of the same, what Soper calls the “Human-Nature paradox” (49). Critical exegeses of the literature have focused on such aspects as gender, colonialism, and post-coloniality. Much of the criticism of Zimbabwean literature has skirted the ecological question.