Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing posthumanist geographies (original) (raw)
Related papers
Decolonizing posthumanist geographies
Cultural Geographies, 2013
This paper engages my struggles to craft geo-graphs or earth writings that also further broader political goals of decolonizing the discipline of geography. To this end, I address a body of literature roughly termed ‘posthumanism’ because it offers powerful tools to identify and critique dualist constructions of nature and culture that work to uphold Eurocentric knowledge and the colonial present. However, I am discomforted by the ways in which geographical engagements with posthumanism tend to reproduce colonial ways of knowing and being by enacting universalizing claims and, consequently, further subordinating other ontologies. Building from this discomfort, I elaborate a critique of geographical-posthumanist engagements. Taking direction from Indigenous and decolonial theorizing, the paper identifies two Eurocentric performances common in posthumanist geographies and analyzes their implications. I then conclude with some thoughts about steps to decolonize geo-graphs. To this end, I take up learnings offered by the Zapatistas. My goal is to foster geographical engagements open to conversing with and walking alongside other epistemic worlds.
Toward a critical posthuman geography
Geographical analyses of posthuman thought have called for the need to develop a critical form of posthumanism that neither rehashes the pitfalls of humanism, nor promulgates a universalized and ungrounded subject position. This article demonstrates how recent advances in critical posthumanism work to address the limitations of posthuman thought by offering a unified philosophical framework that situates knowledge claims and reimagines human subjectivity and human-nonhuman relations. Critical posthumanism not only synthesizes several of the political, methodological, and philosophical strands of posthuman thought that geographers and philosophers have drawn out, but it also foregrounds an affirmative ethico-political ethos toward a historical moment characterized by socioecological injustices, intersectional inequalities, and advanced capitalist economic systems. By separating itself from transhumanist and epochal forms of posthumanism, critical posthumanism offers cultural geographers concentrating on human-nature relations a more philosophically rigorous, socially accountable, and critical way of approaching the stakes involved in posthumanist discussions.
Composing Postcolonial Geographies
This paper seeks to bridge postcolonialism's turn to the environment with postconstructivist ecology and political ontology. Recent critiques by Chakrabarty, Spivak, and associated postcolonial theorists seek to expand the remit of postcolonialism and progressive politics to planetary imperatives, nonhumans, and anthropogenic environmental change. While the more-than-human and collective human environmental impacts are problematic for postcolonialism, they suggest ways to reorient postcolonial epistemology, critique, and progressive politics for the Anthropocene. In so doing, however, they unwittingly assume and reproduce Eurocentric and colonialist ontologies of nature and culture. This paper explains how. By revealing the inner tensions and contradictions within such accounts, I argue for the need to overcome the conceptual reticence within postcolonial studies to making ontological claims. Instead, I advocate a turn to postconstructivist ecology and political ontology. My argument extends tentative turns to materiality in recent postcolonial theory to suggest that postcolonial epistemologies need, increasingly, to attend much more radically to collective ontologies of immanence and ontogenesis. Postconstructivist currents in wider cultural and political geographies may be especially suited to composing and advancing these new postcolonial ecologies. The paper contextualizes examples of ontological approaches to ecology and politics through recent anthropological theory, critical indigeneity scholarship and Amazonian ethnography.
The topology of being and the geopolitics of knowledge
City, 2004
This essay by Nelson Maldonado-Torres examines the conjunction of race and space in the work of several European thinkers. It focuses on Martin Heidegger's project of Searching for roots in the West. This project of searching for roots is unmasked as being complicit with an imperial cartographical vision that creates and divides the cities of the gods and the cities of the damned. Maldonado-Torres identifies similar conceptions in other Western thinkers, most notably Levinas, Negri, Zizeck, Habermas, and Derrida. To the project of searching for roots and its racist undertones, he opposes a Fanonian critical vision that highlights the constitutive character of coloniality and damnation for the project of European modernity. He concludes with a call for radical diversality and a decolonial geopolitics of knowledge.
Decoloniality is, in the first place, a concept whose point of origination was the Third World. Better yet, it emerged at the very moment in which the three world division was collapsing and the celebration of the end of history and a new world order was emerging. The nature of its impact was similar to the impact produced by the introduction of the concept of “biopolitics”, whose point of origination was Europe. Like its European counterpart, “coloniality” moved to the center of international debates in the non-European world as well as in “former Eastern Europe.” While “biopolitics” moved to center stage in “former Western Europe” (cf., the European Union) and the United States, as well as among some intellectual minorities of the non-European followers of ideas that originated in Europe, but who adapt them to local circumstances, “coloniality” offers a needed sense of comfort to mainly people of color in developing countries, migrants and, in general, to a vast quantitative majority whose life experiences, long and short-term memories, languages and categories of thoughts are alienated to life experience, long and short-term memories, languages and categories of thought that brought about the concept of “biopolitics” to account for mechanisms of control and state regulations.
Composing Postcolonial Geographies: Postconstructivism, Ecology, and the Limits of Critique
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geographies, Vol. 35, No. 1, March 2014 pp. 72-87.
This paper seeks to bridge postcolonialism's turn to the environment with postconstructivist ecology and political ontology. Recent critiques by Chakrabarty, Spivak, and associated postcolonial theorists seek to expand the remit of postcolonialism and progressive politics to planetary imperatives, non--humans, and anthropogenic environmental change. While the more--than--human and collective human environmental impacts are problematical for postcolonialism, they suggest ways to re--orient postcolonial epistemology, critique, and progressive politics for the Anthropocene. In so doing, however, they unwittingly assume and reproduce Eurocentric and colonialist ontologies of nature and culture. This paper explains how. By revealing the inner tensions and contradictions within such accounts, I argue for the need to overcome the conceptual reticence within postcolonial studies to making ontological claims. Instead, I advocate a turn to postconstructivist ecology and political ontology. My argument extends tentative turns to materiality in recent postcolonial theory to suggest that postcolonial epistemologies need, increasingly, to attend much more radically to collective ontologies of immanence and ontogenesis. Postconstructivist currents in wider cultural and political geographies may be especially suited to composing and advancing these new postcolonial ecologies. The paper contextualizes examples of ontological approaches to ecology and politics through recent anthropological theory, critical indigeneity scholarship, and Amazonian ethnography.
Unsettling decolonizing geographies
Geographers have long reflected on our discipline's colonial history. Both Indigenous and non‐Indigenous geographers have discussed ways of engaging Indigenous geographies and sought new ways of opening and expanding spaces for Indigenous peoples and Indigenous ways of knowing and being in our discipline. Like many social scientists, geographers name and frame this work in different ways; of late, decolonizing concepts and practices are increasingly deployed. As documented by especially Indigenous scholars, however, the discipline has yet to achieve much semblance of decolonization. This paper takes as a starting point that, despite good intentions, efforts at decolonizing geography are inherently limited because colonization continues to structure the field of geography and the academy more broadly. We begin by placing ourselves in conversations about Indigenous geographies and colonial violence, using this placement as a jumping off point for discussing ways geographers past and present approach decolonization. We pay particular attention to ways theories and articulations about decolonization may be falling short. Second, we offer a critical analysis of decolonization in relation to settler colonial power, including theories and praxes of engaging Indigeneity and Indigenous peoples and places. We discuss Indigenous geographies, what they mean, and to whom they have those meanings. We then turn to Indigenous knowl- edges and Indigenous ways of being and living in the world, problematizing how within more purely conceptual realms and often by non‐Indigenous peoples and geographers, these can be uncoupled or disconnected from ways decolo- nization is circulated and lived. We conclude with cautions and suggestions, based especially on provocations of Indige- nous scholars, about ways geographers might unsettle our work in ongoing efforts toward decolonizing our discipline.