Material and Immaterial Worlds: Comparing the South African Karoo and Venetian Lagoon Literature in Postcolonial Ecocritical Analysis

Despite their topographical differences, both the South African Karoo desert and the Italian Venetian lagoon could be argued as material intersections where the immaterial questions of identity, history, and ecological belonging are negotiated, which is what this thesis explores. By bringing these two landscapes into a direct comparative literary analysis, this study reveals how these pressures are felt, resisted, and memorialised in these communities, while remaining aware of the fact that colonially-inflected resource extraction is still taking place in both. The selected corpus of literature, primarily consisting of 21st-century non-fictional, fictional, or semi-autobiographical texts and poems from the following authors and poets who are intimately connected with the Karoo and Venetian lagoon landscapes were evaluated: Joseph Brodsky, Meena Alexander, Pauline Smith, Etienne van Heerden, Amitav Ghosh, and Diana Ferrus. These works were chosen for their material representations of place, awareness and engagement with immaterial ecological and cultural pressures, and literary reflection on belonging, memory, and resistance in the postcolonial Anthropocene. Placing two unique localities against the backdrop of global concerns offers up fresh insights into the ways literature on landscapes can share, reflect, and resist broader forces of globalised exploitation from two of Earth’s furthest corners. The findings of this thesis bring them in conversation with the postcolonial ecocritical and cultural geographic framework, illustrating how we can understand that this is a crisis of material and immaterial culture and imagination. This paper contributes to the broader scope of cultural, literature and social research, can be read as an interdisciplinary force, and would be complemented by scientific readings to form a more holistic and balanced perspective. It is the task of literature to pierce the constructed realities that do not serve the community or the landscape that they attempt to explain.