Ainehi Edoro, "Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think" (Columbia UP, 2026)

In this episode of the New Books Network, host Morteza Haji Zadeh interviews Dr. Ainehi Adoro, assistant professor of English and African cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about her groundbreaking 2025 book *Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think*, published by Columbia University Press. Adoro reimagines African literary history not through a colonial, linear timeline, but through the lens of the forest as a living, intelligent, and generative space that functions as a co-author in African fiction. She argues that forests in African novels are not passive backdrops but active agents that shape narrative, challenge human exceptionalism, and embody indigenous epistemologies. Drawing on works from Chinua Achebe’s *Things Fall Apart* to Thomas Mofolo’s *Chaka* and Wole Soyinka’s and Ben Okri’s later fiction, Adoro demonstrates how the forest enables radical rethinking of power, identity, and time. She also explores the concept of fragmentation not as disorder but as a creative, generative force rooted in Yoruba cosmology, and introduces the idea of the 'aquatic forest' in contemporary African science fiction as a vision of post-human, multi-species futurity. The conversation underscores how African literature uses the forest as a laboratory for world-making and political critique, offering a powerful alternative to Eurocentric models of narrative and modernity. Adoro’s work challenges dominant readings of African fiction by centering indigenous forms and aesthetics, revealing how African novels think in ways that are deeply ecological, cosmological, and formally innovative. She calls for new modes of reading—what she terms 'literary archaeology'—to uncover the hidden structures and political logics embedded in seemingly peripheral spaces like the 'Evil Forest' in *Things Fall Apart*. The episode concludes with a passionate recommendation to read D.O. Fagunwa’s *Forest of a Thousand Demons*, a seminal Yoruba novel that exemplifies the rich tradition of forest narratives in African literature. The discussion is both intellectually rigorous and accessible, inviting listeners to rethink not only African fiction but the very nature of storytelling, space, and the future.