Postcolonial Ecologies and Environmental Humanities in Nigerian Poetry: Towards a Theory of Nigerian Ecopoetics

This dissertation develops an original theory of Nigerian ecopoetics by systematically analysing the forms, tropes, and ideological positions through which Nigerian poets engage with environmental degradation, ecological knowledge, and the relationship between human communities and the natural world across the full range of Nigeria's ecological zones and literary generations. Ecocriticism has developed productive frameworks for reading the environmental dimensions of literature, but existing theories privilege temperate climate ecosystems, Western Romantic conceptions of nature, and the individual's contemplative relation to landscape in ways that do not fit the specific conditions of Nigerian ecology and the social-ecological relationships that Nigerian poets address. The dissertation constructs a theory of Nigerian ecopoetics through three intersecting moves: a systematic review and critical mapping of existing ecocritical theory identifying its limitations for the Nigerian context; the construction of an original theoretical framework drawing on indigenous ecological knowledge systems, political ecology, African philosophy of nature, and postcolonial environmental humanities; and the application of this framework to close readings of a chronologically organised corpus of 200 Nigerian poems from Okigbo and Osundare through to emerging contemporary voices. The dissertation includes extended readings of the Niger Delta ecopoetic tradition, the savanna and pastoral poetry of Northern Nigeria, and the urban ecological imagination emerging in twenty-first century Lagos poetry. Original contributions include the Nigerian ecopoetics theory itself, a typology of Nigerian ecological tropes, and a model of the relationship between environmental justice advocacy and lyric form in Nigerian poetry. Keywords: ecopoetics, Nigerian poetry, environmental humanities, postcolonial ecology, indigenous knowledge.