Revisiting nonhuman agency in African ecocriticism: the precarity of coastal life in the poetry of Kofi Awoonor and Kofi Anyidoho

One major intervention in ecocriticism is the notion of nonhuman agency, which acknowledges nonhuman bodies as active agents of consequential power, action, and reaction, especially in relation to human willpower and intentionality. Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory and Jane Bennett’s thing power have energized new materialists and material ecocritics to reconfigure power relations in ways that foreground nonhuman actions even in human activities. Inasmuch as this privileging of nonhuman power shines a light on how we may reorient a human-centered view of the world, its universalizing premise calls for a broader understanding of some of the peculiar ways in which nonhuman entities can be considered to show their power in African literature. In this article, I discuss Kofi Awoonor’s and Kofi Anyidoho’s representations of coastal life to argue for a broader understanding of nonhuman agency in African ecocriticism.