ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how people discursively produce sustainability and, relatedly, what people use sustainability to produce. Talk of sustainability often concerns imaginings of extended presents, potential futures, and gone-forever pasts. Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of chronotopes – or, linguistically constructed space-time configurations that emerge in narrative – therefore offers an important lens to analyze discourse that categorizes policies and practices as sustainable or not. Examining materials from corporate-funded biodiversity conservation programs in Tanzania, this chapter explores the chronotopic framings that claims of (un)sustainability index, through which speakers cast possible presents, pasts, and futures in different lights. Specifically, in discourse about this program, speakers employ a chronotope of sustainability in ways that narrow the concept’s applicability to a not-yet-realized future. By locating sustainability in a future that is close, but just out of reach, these and other programs like it discursively uphold corporate authority in ways that perpetuate global inequalities and extractive tendencies which are colonial in origin and effect. Further, they diminish the imaginative possibility of once-sustainable pasts as well as contemporary efforts to decolonize social–environmental relationships. This chapter thus calls critical attention to the neocolonial politics that frame sustainability and, in so doing, aims to open space for imagining and pursuing decolonial alternatives.
