Introduction

The decolonization of Africa – epicentre of extractivism – is a human rights struggle and a struggle for land, water, and resources. To make a case for reading resistance to extractivism through the lens of a ‘poetics of dark oxygen’ (which asks what we might learn from the nonhuman in select African ecocritical literary and cinematographic works), the introduction outlines how the letters to nonhumans that comprise this book are an orchestration of animist storytelling wherein agentic nonhumans steal the show. Each chapter is summarized and the book situated within a growing tradition of ‘improvised scholarship’ among decolonial and ecological scholars.