I make available a corrected copy of the article below, which was printed without the usual editorial attention or communication. (The journal had experienced a moment of sudden, very real hardship.)

In correcting, I have supplied missing words, fixed broken syntax, and sorted out two sections in the text that were marred by a lack of clarity (pp. 90 and 101 and 102)—and I believe I have found the most obvious errors. I indicate in the corrected version page numbers from the RAL print version. So, [RAL88] signals the end of page 87 and the start of page 88.

Vital, Anthony. "Toward an African Ecocriticism: Postcolonialism, Ecology and Life & Times of Michael K." Research in African Literatures, 39.1, 2008, pp. 87-106: corrected version, 20 July 2008, www.postcolonial-ecology.net.

ABSTRACT Recent articles have called for postcolonial and ecology-minded criticism to engage with each other, suggesting, too, some of the points of difficulty they might encounter when they do. One point of difficulty lies in how these two forms of criticism develop differing evaluations of discourse and its relation to what counts as real. This essay proposes resolving this difficulty with a materialist apprehension of discourse and suggests that a postcolonial ecocriticism enacted this way might have value generally for African studies. The essay then examines J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, a novel that has been explored as exemplar of postcolonial ecological thinking, and argues that while Michael K may indeed be shaped by attitudes typical of postcolonial thinking at its inception, it is not a novel with much interest in ecology. The issue for an African ecocriticism, then, is how to grasp the novel’s writing of nature. I argue that its historical juncture provides an interpretive context for how the novel subordinates its writing of nature to its postcolonial suspicion of the modern nation state.