1 Alex La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird (Pearson Education, 1987), 42.

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* Thanks to Ato Quayson for suggesting I think further with Jolly and Fyfe’s postcolonial approach to materialism. Thanks also to Jenny Rhee for sharing her critique of new materialisms awhile back.

3 Todd, Zoe, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29.1 (2016): 4–22, esp. 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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5 Jolly and Fyfe, “Introduction,” 300.

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12 Braidotti, “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others,” 530.

13 Huggan and Tiffin also gesture to the problematic use of animals for human meaning: “most animals … exist for modern-day populations as primarily symbolic: they are given exclusively human significance” (139). Further, they recall the violent history of the metaphorical uses of animals: “The history of human oppression of other humans is replete with instances of animal metaphors and animal categorisations frequently deployed to justify exploitation and objectification, slaughter and enslavement” (135). Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, 1st ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2010).

14 Braidotti, Rosi, The Posthuman (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 36.Google Scholar

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16 Ravenscroft, Alison, “Strange Weather: Indigenous Materialisms, New Materialism, and Colonialism,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5.3 (September 2018): 353–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 358.

17 Ravenscroft, “Strange Weather,” 357.

18 Jolly and Fyfe, “Introduction,” 300.

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21 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 13.

22 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 21.

23 Gregg Lambert emphasizes the singularity of Kafka’s writing style, suggesting that Deleuze and Guattari’s insight into Kafka’s literary strategies (asignification, killing metaphor, etc.) are specific to Kafka’s oeuvre. Their analysis of Kafka’s works, then, doesn’t necessarily prescribe ways of reading and writing. In light of Lambert’s insight, claims that Kafka’s literary strategies should be generalized as practices of reading/writing and replace other modes such as metaphor risks overlooking other strategies, other writing machines. Gregg Lambert, “The Bachelor-Machine and the Postcolonial Writer,” in Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures, ed. L. Burns and B. Kaiser (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 37–54.

24 Edward Tylor regarded the magical aspects of animism as a “farrago of nonsense” (quoted in Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion: By E. E. Evans-Pritchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 26.

25 Deleuze and Guattari mention animist notions at times; however, their acknowledgment of animist thought and their citation of animist and indigenous scholars is often wanting. Their many literary examples are largely European, and although they borrow the term sorcery, for example, they clearly reject sorcery as it is understood in traditional cultures and animist literatures: “There is a reality of becoming-animal, even though one does not in reality become animal” (273). At other times, however, they voice positions more in line with animist notions of animals that emphasize how for shamans, the spirit is embedded in the material animal: “becomings-animal involve an animal Spirit—a jaguar-spirit, bird-spirit” (176). Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

Caroline Rooney also critiques their engagement with African animism: “Their use of research on the Dogon ostensibly interests them as a means of refuting the assumed necessity of Oedipal codings, while the question of how Dogon philosophy… might relate to their philosophy is bypassed.” Caroline Rooney, African Literature, Animism and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 71.

26 Braidotti, “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others,” 528.

27 Braidotti, “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others,” 527.

28 Whyte, Kyle, “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” English Language Notes 55.1–2 (2017): 153–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 157.

29 Plumwood, Val, “Decolonizing Relationships with Nature,” in Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era, eds. Adams, William Mark and Mulligan, Martin (Sterling: Earthscan, 2003), 51–78, esp. 57.Google Scholar

30 Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002). Deborah Bird Rose recognizes Plumwood’s social activism and argues that Plumwood was “defining herself as a philosophical animist” (93) in the way she developed a post-Cartesian philosophy informed by “the significance of Indigenous knowledge” (96). Deborah Bird Rose, “Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Interactions in the Sentient World,” Environmental Humanities 3.1 (May 1, 2013): 93–109.

31 Plumwood, Environmental Culture, 226.

32 Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism,” 267.

33 Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism,” 261.

34 Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism,” 271.

35 Soyinka, Wole, Myth, Literature and the African World, reprint (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

36 Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism,” 267.

37 Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism,” 267.

38 Garuba, Harry, “On Animism, Modernity/Colonialism, and the African Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections,” in Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge, ed. Lesley Green, (Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council, 2013), 42–51, esp. 43.Google Scholar

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42 Quayson, “Magical Realism and the African Novel,” 161.

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44 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (January 2003): 11–40, esp. 24.

45 For further discussion of colonial views of African Spirituality, see Cuthbeth Tagwirei, “The ‘Horror’ of African Spirituality,” Research in African Literatures 48.2 (2017): 22–36. For a critique of Hegel’s racist views of the refusal of the human/nature binary in animist thought, see Marisol De La Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics,’” Cultural Anthropology 25.2 (May 1, 2010): 334–70.

46 Rose, “Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism,” 96.

47 Wole Soyinka, quoted in Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism,” 263.

48 Mkhize, Jabulani, “Reading the Ideological Contradictions in Time of the Butcherbird,” Journal of Literary Studies 31.2 (2015): 29–42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 35.

49 Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, 54.

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51 Garuba suggests critics have overlooked animism in Osundare’s poetry in favor of his Marxist leanings because “animism is often regarded as a reactionary, metaphysical mystification opposed to the spirit of historical materialism and scientific socialism.” Garuba, “On Animism, Modernity/Colonialism, and the African Order of Knowledge,” 276.

52 La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird, 97.

53 La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird, 76.

54 La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird, 98.

55 La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird, 66.

56 La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird, 93.

57 La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird, 106.

58 Plumwood, Environmental Culture, 219.

59 La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird, 101.

60 La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird, 42.

61 La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird, 80.

62 Braidotti, “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others,” 531.

63 Cecil Abrahams, quoted in Kathleen M. Balutansky, The Novels of Alex La Guma: The Representation of a Political Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1990).

64 Jordan, A. C. and Jordan, Archibald Currie, Towards an African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in Xhosa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 31.Google Scholar

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66 Philip Armstrong argues on page 415 of “The Postcolonial Animal” that “[d]efined as that bit of nature endowed with voluntary motion, the animal resists the imperialist desire to represent the natural—and especially the colonial terrain—as a passive object or a blank slate (Birke, 1994)” (Armstrong 415). Lynda Birke, Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew (Buckingham, England: Open University Press, 1994). Philip Armstrong, “The Postcolonial Animal,” Society & Animals 10.4 (2002): 413–19.

67 Couto, The Last Flight of the Flamingo, trans. David Brookshaw (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2004) 86.

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74 Couto, The Last Flight of the Flamingo, 5.

75 Couto. The Last Flight of the Flamingo, 9.

76 Whyte, “Indigenous Climate Change Studies,” 156.

77 Couto, The Last Flight of the Flamingo, 9–10.

78 Couto, The Last Flight of the Flamingo, 128.

79 Couto, The Last Flight of the Flamingo, 148.

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82 Couto, The Last Flight of the Flamingo, 91.

83 Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism,” 270–71.

84 Couto, The Last Flight of the Flamingo, 174.

85 Couto, The Last Flight of the Flamingo, 177.

86 Couto, The Last Flight of the Flamingo, 178.