New Ways of Telling True Stories: Reflections on Ecological Solidarities across Post/Colonial Worlds

Abstract

This special issue asks what can be created, enacted and imagined from within and despite environmental destruction and ecocide. What relationships, assemblages and collaborations between humans and more-than-humans emerge when we accept that the future has already arrived for so many communities who have had, and continue, to live with and through environmental catastrophe? We are not interested in simple recipes for repair or restoration – the contributions collected in this special issue instead foreground the messiness, the accidents and the interdependencies of multiple pasts, presents and yet-to-comes. Solidarity is necessarily entangled with small and large gestures of refusal and resistance, just as much as it is with attempts of living-with disaster and hope simultaneously. In conceiving and compiling a special issue on post/colonial ecological solidarity, we are cognisant of the need to approach the practice of solidarity with nuance. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang suggest, “solidarity is an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict” (3). This points to a way of looking at the possibilities of solidarity as contingent and difficult practices, neither uniform nor given.

Spanning a wide range of geographical sites of post/colonial encounters, from the east coast of Africa to Canada, from the Marshall Islands to Nigeria, from the Bay of Bengal to the Caribbean, the articles in Ecological Solidarities across Post/Colonial Worlds consider how art and literature may be able to reimagine inhabitable pasts, presents and futures. Interweaving different terrestrial and aquatic spaces, following historic and contemporary currents between the world’s oceans and attending to the layered landscapes of colonial violence, the articles in this issue suggest ways to not only theorise post/colonial ecological encounters within contexts of ecological violence, crisis and collapse, but also how to grasp the potentials of ecological un/worlding within and alongside a plethora of spaces: shoals, wetlands, mountains, bays, plains, archipelagos, deserts and deltas. Drawing on concepts of waste, composting, petroculture, discard studies and more, the contributions collected in this special issue foreground Black, Brown, Indigenous and post- and decolonial thinkers and writers – formulating literature and art as transformative praxes that materially and discursively (re)shape the anthropocene. Attuned to these possibilities, the special issue is divided into two sections: the first addresses climate vulnerabilities (Kaur, Preusser, Dang, Sipahi) and the second homes in on multi-species encounters (Bhowmick, Slopek, Bhattacharya, Leetsch, Nelson-Teutsch).