A Postcolonial Ecocritical Study On Doris Lessing’s African Stories

Doris Lessing’s earlier works of African themes have attracted much critical attention since their advent to the public. Through these works, Lessing makes a clear position against colonialism and active attempt to deconstruct Western centralism discourse and practice. Studies in this area are mostly inclined to evolve the persistent issues about race, class, gender and identity based on postcolonial criticism. The results can be remarkable. However, for the same rich natural descriptions and ecological concerns in these works, there still remains a shortage of systematic study, not to mention the attempt to combine the two perspectives to interpret Lessing’s writing. This thesis thus aims to apply Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s theory of postcolonial ecocriticism to the study of Lessing’s African stories, analyzing how she stretches her anti-colonial discourse into natural world. Through examining not only the complex relationship between the black and the white but also a broader one between society and nature, it reveals both the geographical violence and the ecological dominance practiced by the West upon African continent, and then excavates the historical and cultural elements of eco-colonization.The thesis begins with a brief introduction to Doris Lessing and her African stories, reviewing the critical history of Lessing, its features as well as the weak points of studies on her African stories. Based on this literature review, the author of the thesis makes a verification of the possibilities for further research about these works. The main body of this thesis is composed of four chapters. Chapter One gives an account of the birth and development of postcolonial ecocriticism and then expounds the potential feasibility of the study. Chapter Two investigates the association of colonialism with land and probes into European colonizers’ spacial strategies of dispossessing and cultivating African land to establish a sense of place to the alien space. In this condition, the resistance of African land marks a split between political entitlement and spiritual belonging in imperialist mode. Chapter Three focuses on the evolving process of settlers’ attitudes towards African nature: recognition, deconstruction and reconstruction. In the texts, the settlers’ desanctification, objectification and beautification of African nature are three forms of their ecological colonization. The desanctified nature with strong Orientalism color is essentially the West’s collective Utopian imagination of African continent, and it constitutes the driving force of Westerners’ displacement and colonial activities. The objectified nature means the exploitation and destruction of natural resources, which indicates that the initial imagination has turned into practical operation. In this stage, African nature has totally become an oppressed object. The modification or beatification of African nature, being realized as the farms and gardens of settlers’ places, seemingly has built a harmonious order between human and nature. However, in fact it is also a hidden way of colonial expansion. Chapter four concentrates on the relationship between colonization and animals, elaborating the equally grave surviving crisis African animals faced with as indigenous people. It maintains that animals are also beings possessing agency, emotion and self-representing ability. Based on the multiple animal images for instance leopard, buck, cattle and dog in the stories, it proves that Lessing’s engagement with animal narrative involves a subverting attempt to present animals as Selves rather than Other. Such experiment undoubtedly discloses Lessing’s ethical concerns for animals and sincere respect for natural world.In conclusion, from the perspective of postcolonial ecocriticism on Lessing’s African stories, this thesis reveals the complicated power relations of colonial discourse in ecosystem including land, natural resources as well as animals. It digs out the evolution of nature’s responses from passive acceptance to silent resistance and then to self-representation so that mutual respect and harmonious co-existence should be the perpetual and ideal way to get along with between man and man, man and nature.