Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths (Ecology and Justice) by Harris Melanie L

Author:Harris, Melanie L. [Harris, Melanie L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbis Books
Published: 2017-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Making Connections:

African Religion, Ecology, and the Diaspora

Before moving forward to discuss more about the contributions of ecowomanism, it is important to nuance the understanding of African cosmology and an ecowomanist adoption of it. Most thinkers would consider it a risk to ground a concept and method, such as ecowomanism, into a cultural frame rather than a historical frame. One disadvantage, for example, of claiming that womanist race–class–gender analysis is central to ecowomanist method and approaches is that it places ecowomanism in the center of a debate about identity politics, at best, and exhibits the impact of colonial ecology, at worst. That is, without the presence of racial hierarchies, metanarratives that leave out communities of color, and other structural oppressions, some argue there would be no need for a womanist or ecowomanist approach. Black and womanist theologies and ethics have been interpreted as reactionary responses to traditional (read: white) theologies and therefore suspect in that their theoretical base may in fact be based on the same theory used by the oppressors. Using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, to paraphrase Audre Lorde, 25 is a difficult quandary and debate that many black liberation and womanist theologians, ethicists, and theorists have engaged.

Another contentious element in ecowomanist theory involves its adoption of an African cosmological frame. Antonio, 26 Rose Mary Amenga-Etego, 27 and other African traditional religion scholars argue that Western religious, anthropological, and even cultural lenses have misframed the relations between African traditional religions and ecology in problematic ways. This is important because womanist ethics has often been labeled a Western enterprise, and ecowomanism could be (mis)understood the same way. Although I do not agree with this characterization and maintain that womanist religious thought and ecowomanism both attempt to be shaped by nondualistic and nonhierarchal thinking, it is worth noting this very important debate.

Many scholars of African traditional and indigenous religion argue that African traditional religions are too often misunderstood and misinterpreted due to a colonial impetus within most Western lenses. For example, Antonio warns of the Western colonial influence on ecological discourse by problematizing the assumptions that many religious thinkers in the West make about African people and worldviews. In Antonio’s view, the claim that Africans are closer to nature and therefore their worldviews have within them practices that are more earth-honoring than European practices and theologies of nature is wrong and constructed on a false premise. This Western assumption is, at best, culturally unaware and, at worst, racist.

Antonio critiques malformed assumptions often made by white and European environmentalists and exposes their deep investment in a logic that attempts to control Africans and African worldviews. Noting how the logic of domination has woven through the history of colonization and crippled the earth, Antonio points to the eerie similarity between colonial moves to control the bodies of Africans and the body of the earth. He asks whether the white and European assumption that Africans are closer to nature and their move to point their scholarly arrows back toward African religious

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