The Anthropocene’s urgent message about eminent disaster invites us to forget about history and to focus on the present as it careens into an unthinkable future. To counter this, Fragments from the History of Loss: The Nature Industry and the Postcolony emphasizes moments in the history of the production of nature in South Africa, Africa, and beyond as part of the necessary project of analyzing the myths and fantasies that have brought the world to this point of crisis and continue to shape the narratives through which it is understood.
Louise Green is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She is interested in critical theory, studies in modernity and globalization and tracing the elusive, mobile and diverse formations of value in late capitalist society. Her research proposes Africa as an important site for a philosophical engagement with the universalising impulse that marks contemporary narratives of environmental crisis.