5 - Environmental Devastation and Accumulation by Dispossession: Ishmael Beah’s Radiance of Tomorrow and In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo INC.

Summary

Ishmael Beah's Radiance of Tomorrow and In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo INC.

It is indeed part of the larger truth.

This is a place with beautiful things.

Not only in soil but outside as well.

Yet that beauty causes the wretchedness of this place.

—Ishmael Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow

The politics of migration are radically tethered to the politics of the environment and the multinational corporations that instrumentalize and commodify people, the environment, and the land's resources. In our contemporary neoliberal mode of governance, the health of people and the planet is rendered secondary to the concerns of quenching the seemingly insatiable greed of multinational corporations. While the planet and its resources have been instrumentalized, people are viewed as impediments to neoliberal “progress” and neocolonial “development.” The instrumentalization of nature is nothing short of the commodification of nature with the goal of maximizing profit that attends the process of accumulation by dispossession as articulated by David Harvey. Environmental devastation and accumulation by dispossession create an understudied phenomenon that African literature attends to: migration, forced or otherwise, due to environmental devastation. Migrating as a result of environmental devastation often results in regional forms of migration that both novels represent and that extends our investigation of the myriad of forms of migration tracked throughout the course of this book. Although First World Western countries are primarily responsible for the global environmental crisis, it is the poor in the putative Third World and future generations who will largely bear the burden of the West's unsustainable living practices and the corporate and capitalist consumer ideologies sustaining them. Environmental devastation forces those in targeted resource areas to migrate due to the pollution of water and destruction of lands and resources that decreases the livelihood of those affected by environmental devastation.

Recent environmental studies discourse is awash with a host of neologisms attempting to grasp the environmental crisis. The concepts range from the Anthropocene to the Capitalocene and the Eurocene. The aforesaid labels purport to mark epochs to locate a timeframe, or better an origin story, for the emergence of our environmental crisis. In the Eurocene, it is the emergence and planetary spread of European practices of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and the ascension and acceleration of consumer capitalism. In the Anthropocene, it is the emergence of man and carbon to create the Thermocene.