Abstract
This paper centers on Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa from an ecocritical perspective. When dealing with Blixen’s portrayal of the colonial environment there are multiple negotiations at play. Firstly, the question of identity is prominent from the perspective of the names she chose when publishing her works. Secondly, her role as a white woman in colonized Kenya in a British male dominated world is significant. These issues in turn tie in with her play with gender identities, both in her own life and in her fictional creations.
For Blixen as a farm owner in colonized Kenya the land appears to bear the function of a tool that places the self within the landscape in a way that bridges the gap between nature and culture, human and nonhuman. However, the land also affects the interhuman relations of the people on the farm. This paper carries out an ecocritical new materialist reading of the relationships between the human and more than human in Out of Africa using the material feminist concept trans-corporeality to discuss these issues. By tracing of the trans-corporeal relations in the text, this paper raises the question of how the permeability of the landscape shapes identity in Out of Africa. In doing so, this study offers a new perspective on the construction of selfhood in Out of Africa where Blixen’s text materializes as an account where questions of identity nationality, and gender can be seen as invariably connected to the entanglement of body and environment bridging the gap between nature and culture.
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