ABSTRACT

This book brings together emerging insights from across the humanities and social sciences to highlight how postcolonial studies are being transformed by increasingly influential and radical approaches to nature, matter, subjectivity, human agency, and politics. These include decolonial studies, political ontology, political ecology, indigeneity, and posthumanisms. The book examines how postcolonial perspectives demand of posthumanisms and their often ontological discourses that they reflexively situate their own challenges within the many long histories of decolonised practice. Just as postcolonial research needs to critically engage with radical transitions suggested by the ontological turn and its related posthumanist developments, so too do posthumanisms need to decolonise their conceptual and analytic lenses. The chapters' interdisciplinary analyses are developed through global, critical, and empirical cases that include: city spaces and urbanisms in the Global North and South; food politics and colonial land use; cultural and cosmic representation in film, theatre, and poetry; nation building; the Anthropocene; materiality; the void; pluriversality; and, indigenous world views. Theoretically and conceptually rich, the book proposes new trajectories through which postcolonial and posthuman scholarships can learn from one another and so critically advance.

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

A critical bridging exercise

chapter 1|44 pages

For new ecologies of thought

Towards decolonising critique

chapter 2|18 pages

Anti-colonial ontologies

A dialogue

chapter 3|19 pages

Chronic carriers

Creole pigs, postplantation politics, and disturbing agrarian ontologies in Haiti

chapter 4|29 pages

Terra plena

Revisiting contemporary agrarian struggles in Central America through a “full earth” perspective

chapter 5|16 pages

Refracting colonialism in Canada

Fish tales, text, and insistent public grief

chapter 6|19 pages

Unsettling the urban geographies of settler-colonial cities

Aporetic encounters with the spatiotemporal dynamics of modern logic

chapter 7|19 pages

“Well, City Boy Rangoon, it’s time to stitch up the evening”

Material, meaning, and Man in the (post)colonial city

chapter 10|19 pages

Political ontology and international relations

Politics, self-estrangement, and void universalism in a pluriverse