Today is the International Day of Forests, a day to celebrate and raise awareness of the importance of all types of forests. In honor of this day, we are excited to spotlight a recent title from Duke University Press that focuses on forest research and its afterlives.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among neighboring communities of White environmental scientists and First Nations mapmakers in Canada, The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science after the War in the Woods by Tom Özden-Schilling explores the legacies of scientific research that emerged in the wake a period of anti-logging blockades in the late twentieth century. Paul Nadasdy, author of Sovereignty’s Entailments: First Nation State Formation in the Yukon, writes that “In this nuanced ethnographic study of the lives and work of two intertwined communities of professional researchers in British Columbia, Tom Özden-Schilling captures the researchers’ hopes, dreams, frustrations, and disappointments as they struggle to make a living and make their work matter to current and future generations. Extremely well written and tightly argued, The Ends of Research is an impressive and timely work of scholarship that makes important contributions to anthropology and science studies.” Tom Özden-Schilling is Presidential Young Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore.
Check out the introduction to the book here, and be sure to share your International Day of Forests celebrations with the #ForestDay tag.
April showers bring plenty of opportunities to curl up inside with a new book. Check out the great new titles we have coming out this month!
Focusing on the figure of the puta—the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine sexual excess—Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena in Puta Life.
Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey’s commercial fortune-telling cafes where secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals can navigate the precarities of twenty-first-century life in Gendered Fortunes.
Bishnupriya Ghosh explores the media practices that inscribe and transmit data about infectious diseases and shape how we live with perpetual pandemics in The Virus Touch.
Claudia Calirman examines sixty years of visual art by prominent and emerging Brazilian women artists from the 1960s to the present who use gender politics to fight social inequalities, discrimination, structures of power, and state violence in Dissident Practices. If you’re in New York City, you can see artwork related to the book at a new show Calirman has curated at the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery. It will be on display from April 19-June 16.
The contributors to Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life, edited by René Dietrich and Kerstin Knopf, investigate biopolitics and geopolitics as two distinct yet entangled techniques of settler colonial states across the globe, contending that Indigenous life and practices cannot be contained and defined by the racialization and dispossession of settler colonialism.
In Mendings, Megan Sweeney tells an intimate story about family, selfhood, and love and loss, showing how her lifetime practice of sewing and mending clothes becomes a way of living.
In The Queer Art of History, Jennifer V. Evans examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a queer history that moves beyond bounded concepts and narratives of identity, showing how an analytic of kinship more fully illuminates the work of solidarity and intersectional organizing across difference.
Lisa Mitchell explores the historical and contemporary methods of collective assembly that people in India use to hold elected officials and government administrators accountable in Hailing the State.
In The Autocratic Academy, Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn outlines the history of American higher education’s formal organization as an incorporated autocracy that is tied to capitalism, arguing that the academy must reconstitute itself in accordance with the principles of democratic republicanism in which members choose who govern and can hold them accountable.
Timothy D. Taylor offers a behind-the-scenes look at the working composers, musicians, and engineers who create soundtracks for film, television, and video games in Working Musicians.
In A Vital Frontier, Andrea Muehlebach examines the work of activists across Europe as they organize to preserve water as a commons and public good in the face of privatization.
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“Interaction with forests is not a choice. Only how we interact with them is.”
Forests have been around way before humankind. They master life and thought. How much do they know about time and the stars? Or about geometry and chemistry? What about grief and joy? We should ask them, just as many forest dwellers, human and otherwise, have been doing for millennia. We, humans, still need to learn to hear and understand the forests’ answers. Today, March 21, is the observance of the International Day of Forests, a date instituted by the United Nations only eleven years ago. The theme for 2023, “Forests and Health,” is a reminder of how our collective well-being, our flourishing, is deeply rooted and entangled with the fate of these sylvan landscapes—a fate increasingly compromised on account of rapacious economic systems, predatory policies, volatile infrastructures, and armed interests.
Although most of us would associate forests with wilderness and rural places, forests contribute a great deal to the health of urban populations and industrialized societies. A recent report from the Food and Agriculture Organization made that link very explicit[1]. And a tiny virus that jumped from wild animals to human hosts in 2019 and that has provoked more than 6.5 million deaths worldwide is a reminder of that entangled relationship. Interaction with forests is not a choice. Only how we interact with them is. In fact, it is only by virtue of that interaction that we cultivate our humanness.
Consider the following word: naku. It belongs to the Sapara language, the mother tongue of a small number of individuals that compose the Indigenous Sapara nation living in the Amazon, on Ecuador’s eastern border with Peru. Naku might roughly be translated as forest, that sylvan world that surrounds, welcomes, and nourishes this and the about 400 Indigenous nations that call the Amazon rainforest their home. But, unlike the source of natural resources and environmental services that the FAO describes in the aforementioned report, naku describes a profusion of sentient beings (some of animal and vegetal form, others made of more intangible but not less real components) with whom people share different degrees of intellectual, bodily, and spiritual connections. The world, hold different Sapara leaders, is naku, is forest;[2] and to know the world, with all its ferocity and kindness, is fundamentally to engage in meaningful relations with the myriad beings that forests harbor. One cultivates one’s own humanness in the company of these sylvan worlds, as a guest of forests, not as a master of them.
What happens when these relations are severely hindered by war? That is the question that drove my ethnographic inquiry in Bajo Atrato, a region located in the forestlands located on the northwestern Colombian Pacific coast. I saw how armed conflict is an experience wherein suffering extends beyond the people, provoking a form of collective harm that is embodied by the other-than-human beings and the sentient places that compose the traditional territories of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples. Trees heavily pocked from gunfire; rivers that became floating cemeteries of trees; spiritual protectors of game that decided to keep animals out of the reach of people; snakes capable of injecting into their victims’ wounds a poison that pollutes the land that warlords had transformed into oil palm plantations; evil beings that, after having been released by powerful shamans in their attempt to protect communities from the raids carried out by armies, are now wreaking havoc, drowning people and devouring their noses and their fingers. These are some of the afterlives of war, and they have triggered a kind of ecological violence that cannot be easily tackled with the language of human rights and environmental degradation.
War, just like everyday human life, is always a multispecies effort. War, at least as it has been waged in the forests of Colombia, challenges assumptions regarding selfhood, bodies, the elements of life, and the distinctiveness of humans. And given that armed conflict compromises the web of relations through which people and different sentient beings weave their lives together, it also compels us to explore what justice means and how it can be achieved in regions where colonialism, state violence, and militarism have entangled human and nonhuman lives and shown their shared vulnerability. On the International Day of Forests, we should recall that when forests are harmed, when they run amok because of our destructive actions, not only is human health at stake, but the fate of the world itself is jeopardized, because without forests, our world will not simply be poorer. Our world will not be a world at all.
[1] See FAO. 2020. Forests for human health and well-being – Strengthening the forest–health–nutrition nexus. Forestry Working Paper No. 18. Rome. Available on https://www.fao.org/3/cb1468en/cb1468en.pdf
As the weather cools and the holiday season approaches, treat yourself to one of our great new December titles!
In On Paradox, Elizabeth S. Anker contends that the faith in the logic of paradox has been the watermark of left intellectualism since the second half of the twentieth century, showing how paradox generates the very exclusions it critiques and undercuts theory’s commitment to social justice.
Piro Rexhepi explores the overlapping postsocialist and postcolonial border regimes in the Balkans that are designed to protect whiteness and exclude Muslim, Roma, and migrant communities in White Enclosures.
The contributors to Turning Archival, edited by Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici, trace the rise of “the archive” as an object of historical desire and study within queer studies and examine how it fosters historical imagination and knowledge.
In Feltness, Stephanie Springgay considers socially engaged art as a practice of research-creation that germinates a radical pedagogy she calls feltness—a set of intimate practices of creating art based on touch, affect, relationality, love, and responsibility.
Ain’t But a Few of Us, edited by Willard Jenkins, presents over two dozen candid dialogues with Black jazz critics and journalists who discuss the barriers to access for Black jazz critics and how they contend with the world of jazz writing dominated by white men.
In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa, Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years.
Examining a wide range of photography from across the global South, the contributors to Cold War Camera, edited by Thy Phu, Erina Duganne, and Andrea Noble, explore the visual mediation of the Cold War, illuminating how photography shaped how it was prosecuted and experienced.
Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustration, documentary film and photography, as well as collage, craft, and sculpture, Jasmine Nichole Cobb explores Black hair as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness in New Growth.
The contributors to New World Orderings, edited by Lisa Rofel and Carlos Rojas, demonstrate that China’s twenty-first-century rise occurs not only through economics and state politics, but equally through its relationships and interactions with the Global South.
Focusing on his personal day to day experiences of the “shelter-in-place” period during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Alberto Moreiras offers a meditation on intellectual life and the nature of thought under the suspension of time and conditions of isolation in Uncanny Rest.
In Ruderal City, Bettina Stoetzer traces the more-than-human relationships between people, plants, and animals in contemporary Berlin, showing how Berlin’s “urban nature” becomes a key site in which notions of citizenship and belonging as well as racialized, gendered, and classed inequalities become apparent.
Veit Erlmann examines the role of copyright law in post-apartheid South Africa and its impact on the South African music industry in Lion’s Share, showing how copyright is inextricably entwined with race, popular music, postcolonial governance, indigenous rights, and the struggle to create a more equitable society.
Rumya Sree Putcha uses the figure of the Indian classical dancer to explore the complex dynamics of contemporary transnational Indian womanhood in The Dancer′s Voice.
In Feminism in Coalition Liza Taylor examines how U.S. women of color feminists’ coalitional collective politics of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s is an indispensable resource to contemporary political theory, feminist studies, and intersectional social justice activism.
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart charts the social history of ice in Hawaiʻi in Cooling the Tropics, showing how ice and refrigeration underpinned settler colonial ideas about race, environment, and the senses.
The contributors to Siting Postcoloniality, edited by Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hau, reevaluate the notion of the postcolonial by focusing on the Sino-sphere—the region of East and Southeast Asia that has been significantly shaped by relations with China throughout history.
Rupal Oza follows the social life of rape in rural northwest India to reveal how rape is a language through which issues ranging from caste to justice to land are contested in Semiotics of Rape.
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Fall is in full swing, so curl up with a hot drink, a cozy sweater, and a new book! Check out our October releases.
Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood is John D’Emilio’s coming-of-age story in which he takes readers from his working-class Bronx neighborhood and Columbia University to New York’s hidden gay male subculture and the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s. You can catch John D’Emilio discussing his book at the Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City later this month.
Exploring her attraction to tininess and the stories of those who share it, Barbara Browning offers a series of charming short essays that plumb what it means to ponder the minuscule in The Miniaturists.
Gavin Butt tells the story of the post-punk scene in the northern English city of Leeds in No Machos or Pop Stars, showing how bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and Delta 5 to Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget drew on their university art school education to push the boundaries of pop music. Butt will launch his book at an exciting event in Leeds this month, featuring performances by Scritti Politti and The Mekons77.
In Fragments of Truth, Naomi Angel analyzes the visual culture of reconciliation and memory in relation to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Canada established in 2008 to review the history of the Indian Residential School system, a brutal colonial project that killed and injured many Indigenous children.
Drawing on the archives of the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women’s Health Project, Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present in Black Disability Politics. Schalk launches her book at an event at the Ford Foundation in New York City on October 26.
In Changing the Subject, Srila Roy traces the impact of neoliberalism on gender and sexuality rights movements in the Global South through queer and feminist activism in India. Roy is speaking about her book at The New School and Columbia University later this month.
Filipe Maia offers a theological reflection on hope and the future in the context of financialized capitalism in Trading Futures, arguing that the Christian vocabulary of hope can provide the means to build a future beyond the strictures of capitalism.
Coming from the worlds of cultural anthropology, geography, philosophy, science fiction, poetry, and fine art, editors Sophie Chao, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey and the contributors to this volume of The Promise of Multispecies Justice consider the possibility for multispecies justice and speculate on the forms it would take. The authors have developed a multimedia website where you can learn more about this collection.
In Health in Ruins, César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero assesses neoliberalism’s devastating effects on a public hospital in Colombia and how health care workers resisted defunding.
Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre and its century-long legacy of dispossession in Violent Utopia, placing it in a larger historical and social context of widespread anti-Black racism and segregation in Tulsa and beyond.
In a new revised and expanded twentieth anniversary edition of his classic book Big Game, Small World, sportswriter Alexander Wolff travels the globe in search of what basketball can tell us about the world, and what the world can tell us about the game.
AnaLouise Keating provides a comprehensive investigation of the foundational theories, methods, and philosophies of Gloria E. Anzaldúa in The Anzaldúan Theory Handbook.
Nomenclature collects eight volumes of Dionne Brand’s poetry published between 1983 and 2010, as well as a new long poem, the titular Nomenclature for the time being.
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Hispanic Heritage Month which takes place September 15-October 15, celebrates the generations of Hispanic Americans who have positively influenced and enriched our nation and society.
Today, September 26, is Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s birthday, so it’s a fitting day to share our new titles in Latinx studies, including The Anzaldúan Theory Handbook, by AnaLouise Keating. Through archival research and close readings of Anzaldúa’s unpublished and published writings, Keating offers a biographical-intellectual sketch of Anzaldúa, investigates her writing process and theory-making methods, and excavates her archival manuscripts. The book also includes extensive definitions, genealogies, and explorations of eighteen key Anzaldúan theories as well as an annotated bibliography of hundreds of Anzaldúa’s unpublished manuscripts.
In A Kiss across the Ocean, Richard T. Rodríguez examines the relationship between British post-punk musicians and their Latinx audiences in the United States since the 1980s. Melding memoir with cultural criticism, Rodríguez spotlights a host of influential bands and performers including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam Ant, Bauhaus, Soft Cell, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Pet Shop Boys.
The contributors to Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision, edited by Laura E. Pérez and Ann Marie Leimer, examine the artistic practice of artist Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, whose innovative art and urgent engagement with a range of pressing contemporary issues mark her as one of the most vital artists of our time.
In The Florida Room, Alexandra T. Vazquez listens to the music and history of Miami to explore the city’s sonic cultures and its material and social realities. She transforms the “Florida room”—an actual architectural phenomenon—into a vibrant spatial imaginary for Miami’s musical cultures and everyday life.
Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, in Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective, Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force.
In Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love, José David Saldívar offers a critical examination of one of the leading American writers of his generation. He explores Díaz’s imaginative work and the diasporic and immigrant world he inhabits, showing how his influences converged in his fiction and how his writing—especially his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—radically changed the course of US Latinx literature and created a new way of viewing the decolonial world.
Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child by Mary Pat Brady traces the figure of the captive and cast-off child over 150 years of Latinx/Chicanx literature as a critique of colonial modernity and the forms of confinement that underpin racialized citizenship.
Juan Herrera maps 1960s Chicano movement activism in the Latinx neighborhood of Fruitvale in Oakland in Cartographic Memory: Social Movement Activism and the Production of Space. From Chicano-inspired street murals to the architecture of restaurants and shops, Herrera shows how Fruitvale’s communities and spaces serve as a palpable, living record of movement politics and achievements.
In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory.
In The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico, Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo tells the story of how a cluster of self-educated workers burst into Puerto Rico’s world of letters and navigated the colonial polity that emerged out of the 1898 US occupation. They did so by asserting themselves as citizens, producers of their own historical narratives, and learned minds.
Check out all our great titles in Chicanx and Latinx studies here.
For Peer Review Week this year we are sharing some excerpts from recent books that discuss the ideas encompassed by this year’s theme, “Research Integrity: Creating and supporting trust in research.” Today’s post is an excerpt from Pollution Is Colonialism by Max Liboiron.
The joke was old even before it appeared in print:
The Lone Ranger and Tonto find themselves surrounded by hostile Indians. The Ranger asks Tonto: “What are we going to do, Tonto?” To which Tonto replies: “What do you mean we, white man (or paleface, or kemo sabe, depending on the version)?”
Its racist ancestry is undeniable: the joke partly evokes the picture of a feckless subordinate who will treacherously abandon his superior at the first sign of trouble — usually with the ethnic or social group to which the subordinate belongs. But even before 1956, ancient variants of the joke were meant to deflate the condescension of individuals who used the royal “we,” and the insulting presumption of people who assumed, for their own purposes, what they had no business assuming.1
We is rife with such assumptions. A familiar, naturalized narrative about environmental pollution is that We are causing it. We are trashing the planet. Humans are inherently greedy, or wasteful, or addicted to convenience, or naturally self-maximizing, and are downright tragic when it comes to “the” commons. On the other side of the coin, We must rise up, work together, refuse plastic straws, act collectively, and put aside our differences.
I’m not going to dwell on how We erases difference and power relations or how it makes a glossy theory of change that doesn’t allow specific responsibility.2 Here, I want to focus on responsibility — the obligation to enact good relations as scientists, scholars, readers, and to account for our relations when they are not good. And you can’t have obligation without specificity. We isn’t specific enough for obligation. You know this — an elder daughter has different obligations than a mail carrier, and you have different obligations to your elder daughter than to the mail carrier. DuPont has different obligations to plastic pollution than someone with a disability who uses a straw to drink. Even though I’m sure you’ve heard that “everything is related” in many Indigenous cosmologies, this doesn’t mean there is a cosmic similitude of relations. You are not obliged to all things the same way.3 Hence there is a need for specificity when talking about relations.
There can be solidarity without a We. There must be solidarity without a universal We. The absence of We and the acknowledgement of many we’s (including those to which you/I/we do not belong4) is imperative for good relations in solidarity against ongoing colonialism and allows cooperation with the incommensurabilities of different worlds, values, and obligations. There are guidebooks to doing careful, specific solidarity work across difference.5 Indigenous science and technology studies (STS) scholar Kim TallBear has written about “standing with” as a methodological approach to doing research in good relation. In her work, she writes that she “had to find a way to study bio-scientists (whose work has profound implications for indigenous peoples) in a way in which I could stand more within their community,” rather than critiquing them from a place of confrontation and not-caring— an approach that she argues is bad feminist practice. She now moves “towards faithful knowledges, towards co-constituting my own knowledge in concert with the acts and claims of those who I inquire among.”6 Indigenous peoples, settlers, and others have different roles and responsibilities in the “challenge to invent, revive, and sustain decolonizing possibilities and persistences.”7 Rather than fixing or saving one another, “giving back,”8 or assuming that ongoing colonial Land relations only harm Indigenous people, “within the condition of alterlife the potential for political kinship and alter-relations comes out of the recognition of connected, though profoundly uneven and often complicit, imbrications in the systems that distribute violence.”9 This is investment without assumed access to our subjects and areas of research.
Max Liboiron is Associate Professor of Geography at Memorial University. Pollution Is Colonialism is available for 30% off on our website with coupon SAVE30.
Footnotes
Hello, Reader! Thank you for being here. These footnotes are a place of nuance and politics, where the protocols of gratitude and recognition play out (sometimes also called citation), where warnings and care work are carried out (including calling certain readers aside for a chat or a joke), and where I contextualize, expand, and emplace work. The footnotes support the text above, representing the shoulders on which I stand and the relations I want to build. They are part of doing good relations within a text, through a text. Since a main goal of Pollution Is Colonialism is to show how methodology is a way of being in the world and that ways of being are tied up in obligation, these footnotes are one way to enact that argument. Thank you to Duke University Press for these footnotes.
1. Ivie, “What Do You Mean ‘We,’ White Man?” Also see Heglar, “Climate Change Ain’t the First Existential Threat”; Hecht, “African Anthropocene”; and Whyte, “Is It Colonial Déjà Vu?” All of these pieces break out of the violence and myopia of “we” as a way to critique mainstream environmental narratives, including the notion of the Anthropocene (which is also a key critique in Murphy, “Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations”).
2. If you want some more of that, see M. Liboiron, “Against Awareness, for Scale”; and M. Liboiron, “Solutions to Waste.” There is also an entire chapter on the problems of We in a currently in-progress manuscript called Discard Studies that I am writing with excellent collaborator Josh Lepawsky (settler).
3. The idea that obligations are specific is put into practice by many different Indigenous thinkers, but this guiding principle is not exclusive to Indigenous groups. I think of New Orleans activist Shannon Dosemagen (unmarked), director of the Public Lab for Open Technology and Science, whose understandings of relations as the primary source, goal, and ethic of community science have led to a career in bringing people together in a good way and building technologies and platforms to support those relations. See Dosemagen, Warren, and Wylie, “Grassroots Mapping.” I also think about Labrador-based scholar Ashlee Cunsolo (settler), director of the Labrador Institute, whose directorship is premised on building and maintaining relations in a context of complex geopolitics and competing interests, and who exemplifies humility, generosity, and gratitude in every setting I’ve seen her in. See Cunsolo and Landman, Mourning Nature. Shannon and Ashlee, thank you for your examples of putting the relational politics that so many people talk about into practice in ways that far exceed the cultural and ethical norms of your existing institutions. It has been a great gift being activist-administrators with you.
4. Acknowledging where you do not belong while remaining aligned with those who do seems to be one of the more difficult lessons of allyship. I recently attended an “Indigenous LGBTQ2S+” gathering where white and non-Indigenous allies were thanked for attending, but then asked to leave so we could build a certain type of community. The settler sitting beside me didn’t leave. She was clearly nervous and unsure of what to do, but her inability to choose the embarrassment of standing up and leaving, and thereby outing herself as a white person, over the choice to stay in a place she had been asked to leave by those she was there to support meant that she probably isn’t ready for the even harder choices involved with Indigenous queer folk. Because of her choice, I had to take time to teach her when she was ignorant of something a speaker said. You can stand with a group without standing in their midst. In fact, sometimes standing-with-but-over-there is the best place to stand. A similar story is told by Sara Ahmed in the context of trying to have a Black Caucus professional meeting in On Being Included. I’m sure you have your own stories.
5. Land, Decolonizing Solidarity; Gaztambide-Fernández,“Decolonization and the Pedagogy of Solidarity”; Walia, “Decolonizing Together”; TallBear, “Standing with and Speaking as Faith”; Amadahy and Lawrence, “Indigenous Peoples and Black People in Canada.”
6. TallBear, “Standing with and Speaking as Faith,” 5. Thank you, Kim, for your big, bold, Out-in-public work and thinking as well as your tableside, quieter talks. I’m sure you know that your work — written scholarship, Twitter essays and jokes, gathering and organizing — props the door open for so many others, and for this I am grateful. Also, love the hair. Maarsi, Kim.
7. Murphy, “Against Population, towards Alterlife,” 122 – 23.
8. TallBear writes about Gautam Bhan’s (Indian) notion of “continuous and multiple engagements with communities and sites of research rather than a frame of giving back,” which maintains a benevolent narrative of wealth and deficit. TallBear, “Standing with and Speaking as Faith,” 2.
9. Murphy, “Against Population, towards Alterlife,” 120.
Alongside its significance as a testament to Indigenous Peoples’ historical and ongoing efforts to secure recognition of their rights on the international stage, the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples offers an important opportunity to reflect upon and acknowledge Indigenous Peoples’ vital role as custodians and guardians of biodiversity. Numbering around 300 – 500 million, Indigenous Peoples represent approximately six percent of the world’s population and own, occupy or otherwise make use of some twenty-two percent of global land area. Yet Indigenous Peoples protect over eighty percent of global biodiversity —even as their roles as holders of ecological knowledge and as intergenerational environmental custodians continue to be denied due recognition.
Recognizing and supporting Indigenous Peoples’ vital contributions to environmental health and sustainability is becoming all the more urgent in the age of the so-called “Anthropocene,” an epoch in which large-scale industrial and extractive activities are undermining conditions of life on a planetary scale and thwarting the shared futures and relations of human and other-than-human communities of life. This epoch finds root in violent histories of imperial incursion, settler-colonization, and racial capitalism. The afterlives of these histories continue to entrench the logic of accumulation through dispossession on the one hand, and the fictive division of the human from the non-human on the other —both of which run deeply counter to Indigenous philosophies, protocols, and practices of more-than-human coexistence.
Over the last decade, I have had the immense privilege of encountering and understanding this ethos of more-than-human relationality through the course of long-term ethnographic fieldwork I conducted among the Marind-Anim, an Indigenous People inhabiting the Indonesian-colonized region of West Papua, whose customary lands, forests, and territories are rapidly giving way to state and corporate-owned monocrop oil palm plantations. In this rural area, mass deforestation and agribusiness expansion are radically undermining Marind’s livelihoods, food security, health, and socio-economic conditions of life. Just as importantly, these transformations are severing Marind from their intimate and ancestral relations to myriad forest organisms with whom they share common descent from ancestral spirits and with whom they entertain relations of reciprocal nurture and care —sago palms, cassowaries, birds of paradise, rivers, rocks, soils, mangroves, and many, many more. Each of these living entities’ futures are jeopardized by the incursion of oil palm monocrops. Each of these jeopardized futures in turn undermine Marind’s ability to become-with plants, animals, and elements, in ways that are bioculturally, spiritually, and ethically meaningful
Much like Marind extend agency, sentience, and personhood to their native forest kin, so too they consider the plant of oil palm to be endowed with its own particular kind of animacy, needs, and desires. On the one hand, the proliferation of this introduced cash crop undermines multispecies forest futures by destroying the environments necessary for Marind and their other-than-human kin to survive and thrive. And yet, as Marind often remind me, oil palm itself is also subject to the dictates of human, biotechnological, institutional, and economic prerogatives. For this reason, Marind whom I worked often expressed pity and compassion towards oil palm —a plant that they described as an assailant, invader, and colonizer, but whom they also empathized with as a suffering victim, uprooted orphan, and object of technocapitalist violence. Oil palm, then, exists to Marind not only as a driver of more-than-human destruction, but also as a rightful subject of multispecies justice and a potential ally in emergent forms of multispecies solidarity.
There is something incredibly powerful about Marind’s multiplicitous characterizations of oil palm. Marind refuse to reduce oil palm to any singular ontology —good or bad, friend or enemy, or plant or person. In doing so, my companions articulate a kind of epistemic resistance to the homogenizing logic of the plantation itself —a material form and enduring ideology that lies at the heart of Western colonial logics and a nature-culture divide that may be fictive, but whose violent effects ripple within and across species lines. Instead, Marind ways of knowing and relating to both native forests and introduced monocrops speak to their sense of self, struggle, and survivance as more-than-human processes. Within these processes, the fates and futures of beings both human and non-human, and lively and lethal, are at stake. In this age of planetary unraveling, Marind philosophies of more-than-human coexistence thus bring us to reimagine which beings count in the world, and which worlds get to count.
For a non-Indigenous scholar like myself, operating within a discipline (anthropology) that has historically been instrumental to furthering colonial agendas, the labor of reimagining more-than-human relationality has demanded that I attempt to do justice in my writings to the richly complex and transforming ways in which Indigenous Peoples themselves experience, theorize, and contest the attritive effects of colonial-racial-capitalist regimes on Indigenous ways of being, thinking, and doing. Just as importantly, it has meant centering in my work the knowledges of Indigenous scholars and practitioners, in a collective effort to challenge the hegemony and boundaries of established intellectual canons. Thinking-with Indigenous scholars brings to the fore oft-effaced dimensions of more-than-human coexistence—Christine Winter’s framing of plants, animals, and land as subjects of dignity, for instance, Makere Stewart-Harawira’s attention to the sacrality of ecology within Indigenous spiritualities, Max Liboiron’s critique of the ambiguous alignment of environmental science with the colonial project, and Kim TallBear’s invitation to think beyond “species” in reimagining planetary animacies.
As my Marind companions in West Papua remind me, a Day (officially observed and recognized or not) matters only so much as what one does with it —practically, intellectually, affectively. Today, my friends tell me they plan to sit by the highways and mourn their forest kin-turned-roadkill. They will visit former sago groves and pay their respects to deceased and uprooted plants. They will weave rattan bags in the forest and sing to the birds and animals who once populated them. They will also celebrate the stories of the rocks and rivers who birthed them, exalt the rains and soils that hold them, and praise the wetness and skin that bind them.
Photo by Louise M. Cooper
These acts of reverence, my companions explain, will be about grief and loss, but also about continuance and resistance. They speak to the indissociability of human and other-than-human beings, becomings, and belongings as an expression of what Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese might term “radical care” —that is to say, a refusal not to care, even in the face of violent multispecies presents and potentially darker multispecies futures. In doing so, these acts of remembrance celebrate Indigenous lands and lives whose stories have been violently stolen, silenced, and sanitized, yet that remain vibrant sites and sources of Indigenous survivance, continuance, and resurgence.
We’re always pleased to see our books land on various best of the year lists. Check out some of the great titles that were featured in 2021’s lists.
Pitchfork named Joshua Clover’s Roadrunner to their Best Music Books of 2021 list, calling it “as ecstatic as the music it celebrates.”
On the International Center of Photography blog, Vince Aletti included A Time of Youth by William Gedney in his list of the top ten photobooks of the year, writing that Gedney’s “queer eye never misses the shaggy-haired beauties and the tender, erotic undercurrent here is Gedney’s signature.”
The New York Times’s Holland Cotter put the Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s The Dirty South on his list of the best art exhibitions of the year, and the catalog, which we distribute, on his list of the best art books of the year. He says, “The book vividly illustrates and deepens the show’s powerful argument.” Cotter also named Lorraine O’Grady’s Brooklyn Museum retrospective, Both/And as one of the year’s best exhibitions, and said her 2020 book Writing in Space, 1973-2019 was “a vital supplement to the show.” You can catch The Dirty South at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston through February 6 and Both/And at Greensboro’s Weatherspoon Art Museum from January 4-April 30, 2022.
Smithsonian Magazine asked contributors to name their best books of 2021 and Joshua Bell, curator of globalization recommended Max Liboiron’s Pollution Is Colonialism, calling it “a beautifully written text that is both a handbook on method and a call to rethink how we live our lives on occupied land.”
Entropy put Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Dub: Finding Ceremony on its list of 2020 and 2021’s best poetry books. And Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, told The Art Newspaper that her trilogy, including Spill, M Archive, and Dub, was his best read of the year. He said, “This trilogy, as well as Gumbs’s most recent work, Undrowned, offers fascinating insights into new forms of togetherness—among ourselves and our environment.”
Christianity Today selected Chosen Peoples by Christopher Tounsel as a finalist for its best History and Biography book of the year.
On the Verso books blog, Mark Neocleous selected Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony as his best book of the year, saying it was “a nuanced rethinking of Foucault’s relation to Marx and Marxism.”
Writing in The Millions about the best books she read this year, Arianna Rebolini said Magical Habits by Monica Huerta was “much-needed reminder that there are countless ways to tell a story, and that a book can be whatever you want it to be.”
If you haven’t already, we hope you will seek out some of these highly recommended books!
As 2021 comes to a close, we’re reflecting on the most read articles across all our journals. Check out the top 10 articles that made the list, all freely available until the end of January.
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