A Postcolonial Ecocritical Study of African Dystopian Climate Fiction: It Doesn't Have to Be This Way

Abstract: This study aims to comprehend why environmental activism in African literature is represented as a failed attempt to resist the perpetuation of climate criminality.  Through textual analysis of the South African author Alistair Mackay’s dystopian climate fiction, It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way (2022), this paper challenges the conceptual frameworks that portray indigenous environmentalism as anti-nationalist. Mackay’s novel illustrates how political indifference escalates the pursuit of climate justice into radical and even violent forms of resistance. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism, this paper elucidates how the Western model of development establishes itself as a form of neocolonialism across the political and environmental landscape of the non-Western world. In Mackay’s novel, South Africa is represented as a bifurcated nation caught between two conflicting material and ideological trajectories: developmentalism and environmentalism. In the story, Luthando, a black African man of queer identity, protests against the Western capitalist system for accelerating the climate crisis, but he encounters opposition from pro-industrial Africans. This articulates how environmental attitudes in postcolonial countries are shaped by what the postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha has termed ‘ambivalence’. Analysing the ambivalent responses to ecological issues, this study will emphasise the central question of why ambivalence is significant for speculating about a sustainable future. This study will investigate whether climate fiction serves any environmental purpose or merely functions as propaganda for Western ideologies. Moreover, the integration of the dystopian element in the story will be analysed as a mode of satire against the Western heteronormative religious and capitalist practices. It will examine how these Western ideological apparatuses exacerbate the identity crisis of queer people in a climatically post-apocalyptic world. Keywords: Ambivalence, Climate fiction, Development, Postcolonial ecocriticism, Resistance.