Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction: Transforming Reproductive Agency

This book explores how four writers from Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe address the ethics of abortion and reproductive choice, challenging conventional understandings of development, growth, and time. It merges queer ecocritical perspectives from materialism and postcolonialism to reconsider the future of reproductive health matters in southern Africa.

Format: Hardback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 09 February 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

This book delves into a comprehensive examination of the ethics of abortion and reproductive choice within the context of southern Africa's liberation struggles, spanning from the late 1970s to the 1990s. By focusing on a selection of texts that document both the shifting attitudes towards terminations of pregnancy and the dramatic environmental, medical, and socio-political developments during this period, the book seeks to explore how four writers from Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe address these ethical dilemmas.

Drawing upon new materialist theory, which challenges conventional notions of human rights by asserting that all matter holds agency, the book proposes a novel perspective on recent fiction. It argues that southern African women writers anticipate and surpass current feminist revivals of materialist thought, offering a fresh and innovative approach to understanding the complexities of abortion and reproductive choice.

The authors of the selected texts challenge contemporary discourse framing abortion as either a confirmation of a woman's "right to choose" or an unethical termination of human life. Instead, they delve into the complexities of gestation, both literal and metaphorical, and question conventional understandings of development, growth, and time. Through close readings of both the literal gestation depicted in the selected texts and the metaphorical reproduction of the post/colonial nation, the study advances the concept of reproductive agency, creating a range of queer ecocritical alternatives to tropes such as "the Mother Country," "Mother Africa," or "the birth of a nation."

By situating abortion narratives alongside contemporary postcolonial feminist theories, the study seeks to merge traditional beliefs with materialist views in order to reconsider the future of reproductive health matters in southern Africa. The book will appeal to students and researchers in the medical humanities, new materialisms, and postcolonial studies, offering a rich and interdisciplinary exploration of these critical issues.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350250185