UC Santa Cruz

The literature of the Horn of Africa (Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somaliland, and Somalia) together composes a regional literary ecology. While largely erased in literary and African studies, the Horn and its literatures—written in languages including Amharic, Tigrinya, Somali, English, French, and Italian—emerge in relation to compounding scales of social and environmental loss across the long twentieth century and into the twenty-first. By attending to the aesthetic language of nature and weather in Horn of Africa novels and the divergent, unmappable, and undisciplined ways of being and thinking they engender, this project argues that Global South literary cultures such as the Horn’s have long been aware of and lived with real and metaphorical extreme weather. Moreover, writers use imperially-contaminated literary forms such as the novel to narrate, bear witness to, and grieve the losses caused by empire that traverse personal, communal, and environmental scales. Working with a multinational, multitemporal, and multilingual archive, this project develops a ground-up critical analytic that enacts methodological and disciplinary alternatives to the siloed categories of academic study. It presents African literary texts as modes of environmental theory, situated knowledge, and critical and creatively productive grief, and it insists on critical recognition of the Horn of Africa outside the well-trod registers of natural disaster and social conflict.