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Chapter 12 - Indigeneity

Posthumanist Fantasy and Weird Reality

from Part II - Contexts and Controversies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2023

Derek Ryan
Affiliation:
University of Kent, Canterbury
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Summary

In earnest efforts to disrupt the racialized space of Anthropocene conversations, Indigenous epistemological alternatives have emerged as exceptional antidotes to ecological despair with privileged access to nonhuman and interspecies lifeworlds. While many Indigenous approaches do offer beneficent alternatives, their broadscale characterization tends to deposit fresh essentialisms in the wake of the old, and battles over intellectual privacy and appropriation frustrate coalitional urgency. Thus, the very incommensurability that these new approaches seek to demolish – those nourished by the imperial practices we aim to counter – are rejuvenated. Simultaneously, Indigenous critical thought continues to herald its singular capacities for reclamation, and at the same time to police its appropriation, at once demanding and rejecting inclusion in serious academic and scientific conversations. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s concept of the “weird” as a way of conceptualizing human embeddedness in a vast biosphere of nonhuman others that both contains and erases us, this chapter argues that a politics of action based on exceptional epistemologies and myths of alterity cannot succeed. We are tangled in a structural universe where fictions of difference – not just between humans and nonhumans, but among humans themselves – emerge from the very systems we seek to explode.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Indigeneity
  • Edited by Derek Ryan, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals
  • Online publication: 26 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009300032.015
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  • Indigeneity
  • Edited by Derek Ryan, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals
  • Online publication: 26 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009300032.015
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Indigeneity
  • Edited by Derek Ryan, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals
  • Online publication: 26 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009300032.015
Available formats
×