Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture by Roger Bromley (review)

Abstract

259 Blackness’ function in Heideggerian thought “is to enable and sustain the primordial relation between Dasein and being” (58), essentially by serving as the opposite to being itself. Heidegger’s concept of landscape is thereby revealed to be exclusionary, both denying certain groups of people access to Dasein and reinforcing the coloniality of nature. Eggan’s engagement with the fields of decolonial studies and Black studies is extremely important, as it works against the hegemonic understanding of Heidegger’s work. In a book concerned with settler-colonialism, it is no surprise that the voices of white writers and thinkers take center stage—but Eggan’s strategy in this first chapter to incorporate marginalized voices is laudable. However, when Eggan turns to the work of Schreiner, Lessing, and Coetzee in the latter half of his book, there is not much engagement with Black scholars, especially those from Southern Africa. While Eggan incisively and knowledgeably explicates the African historical context for farm-narratives in his fourth chapter, and centers the story of Indigenous Southern Africans, he misses the opportunity to draw upon the work of Black scholars when he discusses the novels themselves. This is emblematic of a larger issue I see with Eggan’s work: if settler-colonialism is a political (and racial) issue, I am not sure it is possible to work toward “widespread, concerted acts of multispecies community building and restor(y)ation” (240) without first achieving a baseline of environmental/racial justice for the people historically displaced by settler-colonialism. In a similar sense, to read white writing, especially from Southern Africa, without also deeply engaging with the Black voices on the continent obviously works against this mission of “restor(y)ation.” While Unsettling Nature as a whole is an erudite and important examination of settler-colonial narratives, Eggan’s conclusion that “all entities are natural aliens, guests on contested land” (241) skips years of necessary work on race, difference, and environmental justice.