Garth Myers – författare

Environment at the Margins brings literary and environmental studies into a robust interdisciplinary dialogue, challenging dominant ideas about nature, conservation, and development in Africa and exploring alternative narratives offered by writers and environmental thinkers. The essays bring together scholarship in geography, anthropology, and environmental history with the study of African and colonial literatures and with literary modes of analysis. Contributors analyze writings by colonial administrators and literary authors, as well as by such prominent African activists and writers as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Mia Couto, Nadine Gordimer, Wangari Maathai, J. M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, and Ben Okri. These postcolonial ecocritical readings focus on dialogue not only among disciplines but also among different visions of African environments. In the process, Environment at the Margins posits the possibility of an ecocriticism that will challenge and move beyond marginalizing, limiting visions of an imaginary Africa.Contributors:Jane CarruthersMara GoldmanAmanda HammarJonathan HighfieldDavid McDermott HughesRoderick P. NeumannRob NixonAnthony VitalLaura Wright

Environment at the Margins brings literary and environmental studies into a robust interdisciplinary dialogue, challenging dominant ideas about nature, conservation, and development in Africa and exploring alternative narratives offered by writers and environmental thinkers. The essays bring together scholarship in geography, anthropology, and environmental history with the study of African and colonial literatures and with literary modes of analysis. Contributors analyze writings by colonial administrators and literary authors, as well as by such prominent African activists and writers as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Mia Couto, Nadine Gordimer, Wangari Maathai, J. M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, and Ben Okri. These postcolonial ecocritical readings focus on dialogue not only among disciplines but also among different visions of African environments. In the process, Environment at the Margins posits the possibility of an ecocriticism that will challenge and move beyond marginalizing, limiting visions of an imaginary Africa.Contributors:Jane CarruthersMara GoldmanAmanda HammarJonathan HighfieldDavid McDermott HughesRoderick P. NeumannRob NixonAnthony VitalLaura Wright

Africa’s urban population is growing rapidly, raising numerous environmental concerns. Urban areas are often linked to poverty as well as power and wealth, and hazardous and unhealthy environments as the pace of change stretches local resources. Yet there are a wide range of perspectives and possibilities for political analysis of these rapidly changing environments.Written by a widely respected author, this important book will mark a major new step forward in the study of Africa’s urban environments. Using innovative research including fieldwork data, map analysis, place-name study, interviewing and fiction, the book explores environmentalism from a variety of perspectives, acknowledging the clash between Western planning mind-sets pursuing the goal of sustainable development, and the lived realities of residents of often poor, informal settlements. The book will be valuable to advanced undergraduate and graduate level courses in geography, urban studies, development studies, environmental studies and African studies.

Africa’s urban population is growing rapidly, raising numerous environmental concerns. Urban areas are often linked to poverty as well as power and wealth, and hazardous and unhealthy environments as the pace of change stretches local resources. Yet there are a wide range of perspectives and possibilities for political analysis of these rapidly changing environments.Written by a widely respected author, this important book will mark a major new step forward in the study of Africa’s urban environments. Using innovative research including fieldwork data, map analysis, place-name study, interviewing and fiction, the book explores environmentalism from a variety of perspectives, acknowledging the clash between Western planning mind-sets pursuing the goal of sustainable development, and the lived realities of residents of often poor, informal settlements. The book will be valuable to advanced undergraduate and graduate level courses in geography, urban studies, development studies, environmental studies and African studies.

This book provides new insights into popular understandings of urbanism by using a wide range of case studies from lesser studied cities across the Global South and Global North to present evidence for the need to reconstruct our understanding of who and what makes urban environments.Myers explores the global hierarchy of cities, the criteria for positioning within these hierarchies and the successes of various policymaking approaches designed specifically to boost a city’s ranking. Engaging heavily with postcolonial studies and Global South thinking, he shows how cities construct one another’s spaces and calls for a new understanding of planetary urbanism that moves beyond Western-centric perspectives.

Drawing on ideas from postcolonial theory and literary and cultural studies Garth Myers develops a new framework for re-imagining global urban studies. This framework is developed in dialogue with the work of Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant, in particular his collection of essays entitled, Treatise on the Whole-World, which deploys analogy and juxtaposition to elucidate relationality between places.Utilizing this methodology, which is comparative in nature, each chapter is based around a pair of cities through which different themes are explored. The pairings are: Fort de France, Martinique with Zanzibar, Tanzania; the Zambian Copperbelt with Scranton, USA; Kingston, Jamaica with Hartford, USA; and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania with Los Angeles, USA. Each chapter combines historical, literary and cultural studies with analysis of a tangible, crucial issue in urban studies. In so doing, the book addresses some of the key concerns of canonical literature in Global North urban studies – from the Manchester School, Chicago School and Los Angeles School, along with the work of Jane Jacobs – and considers what an alternative Glissantian cultural approach might offer.

Drawing on ideas from postcolonial theory and literary and cultural studies Garth Myers develops a new framework for re-imagining global urban studies. This framework is developed in dialogue with the work of Martinican poet and thinker Edouard Glissant, in particular his collection of essays entitled, Treatise on the Whole-World, which deploys analogy and juxtaposition to elucidate relationality between places.Utilizing this methodology, which is comparative in nature, each chapter is based around a pair of cities through which different themes are explored. The pairings are: Fort de France, Martinique with Zanzibar, Tanzania; the Zambian Copperbelt with Scranton, USA; Kingston, Jamaica with Hartford, USA; and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania with Los Angeles, USA. Each chapter combines historical, literary and cultural studies with analysis of a tangible, crucial issue in urban studies. In so doing, the book addresses some of the key concerns of canonical literature in Global North urban studies - from the Manchester School, Chicago School and Los Angeles School, along with the work of Jane Jacobs - and considers what an alternative Glissantian cultural approach might offer.