Writing environmental resilience in the anthropocene in Benjamin Branoff’s “Window Seat” and Doreen Baingana’s “Tropical Fish”

This article aims to examine literary representations of East African urban environments and their human contexts. It considers environmental studies as an intersecting field that draws on theories of resilience, resistance, and neoliberalism to articulate the complex relationship between human beings and the environment. Environmental theories stress that human development is influenced by multiple and intersecting networks, including the external and immediate environments. The article draws upon Sarah Bracke’s theory of resilience to read selected short stories set in East Africa through the lens of ecocriticism, which argues for a critique of the Anthropocene. It analyses Benjamin Branoff’s “Window Seat” and Doreen Baingana’s “Tropical Fish” through the lens of Graham Huggan’s and Helen Tiffin’s theory of postcolonial ecocriticism to argue that these stories illustrate literature’s role in responding to green concerns, and challenging life patterns and policies accelerating pollution and habitat loss, which work to the detriment of the environment.