Decolonizing imperial epistemologies in African environmental historiography : chemical violence, postcoloniality and new narratives of the toxic epidemic in Africa

Abstract

African history and environmental history have had negligible impact on each other. The field of environmental history has had limited traction in influencing the writing of African history and generating critical discourses that urgently frame the continent’s postcolonial experiences beyond hegemonic and imperial epistemologies. Consequently, much of African environmental history research has struggled to appeal to postcolonial scholarship and provide relevant conceptual and methodological frameworks rooted in the objective imperatives of the present. This paper invites African environmental historians to generate urgent scholarship that concretely engages with postcolonial encounters and the contemporary manifestations of historical subaltern vulnerabilities. Through this, African environmental history research should seek to construct narratives that prompt the imperative for accountability, culpability, empowerment and the imagination of alternative ways of writing the past into the present. The paper appropriates and deploys slow “chemical violence” as a concept through which postcoloniality can be conscripted to construct new analytical and methodological pathways in the writing of African environmental history.