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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The world is in the midst of a storm that has shaped the history of modernity along a double fracture: on the one hand, an environmental fracture driven by a technocratic and capitalist civilization that led to the ongoing devastation of the Earth’s ecosystems and its human and non-human communities and, on the other, a colonial fracture instilled by Western colonization and imperialism that resulted in racial slavery and the domination of indigenous peoples and women in particular.
In this important new book, Malcom Ferdinand challenges this double fracture, thinking from the Caribbean world. Here, the slave ship reveals the inequalities that continue during the storm: some are shackled inside the hold and even thrown overboard at the first gusts of wind. Drawing on empirical and theoretical work in the Caribbean, Ferdinand conceptualizes a decolonial ecology that holds protecting the environment together with the political struggles against (post)colonial domination, structural racism, and misogynistic practices.
Facing the storm, this book is an invitation to build a world-ship where humans and non-humans can live together on a bridge of justice and shape a common world. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in environmental humanities and Latin American and Caribbean studies, as well as anyone interested in ecology, slavery, and (de)colonization.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Ships
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Foreword – Angela Y. Davis
Notes
Prologue: A Colonial and Environmental Double Fracture
A modern tempest
Noah’s ark or the colonial and environmental double fracture
The slave ship or modernity’s hold
A world-ship: the world as a horizon for ecology
Reaching the eye of the tempest
Notes
Part I The Modern Tempest: Environmental Violence and Colonial Ruptures
1 Colonial Inhabitation: An Earth without a World
Principles of colonial inhabitation: geography, exploitation of nature, and othercide
Foundations of colonial inhabitation: land grabs, massacres, and land clearing
Forms of colonial inhabitation: private property, plantations, and slavery
Notes
2 The Matricides of the Plantationocene
The end of a nourishing earth: from
conucos
to plantations
The ecumenal rupture: a “land-without-
manman
”
Ruptures in the landscape, biodiversity, and metabolic exchange
From colonial inhabitation to the Plantationocene
Notes
3 The Hold and the Negrocene
Hold politics
The refusal of the world
Destruction of community ties and affiliations
Loss of body, loss of Earth
Off-
polis
: the engineering of a non-political being
The specificity of the condition of enslaved Negresses
The Negrocene
Notes
4 The Colonial Hurricane
The colonial hurricane
Shakespeare and Césaire: when the tempest serves the masters’ interests
Conrad and Katrina: when the tempest creates the world’s holds
Turner and the
Zong
: the pretext-tempest for throwing the world overboard
The politics of the colonial hurricane and global warming
Notes
Part II Noah’s Ark: When Environmentalism Refuses the World
5 Noah’s Ark: Boarding, or the Abandonment of the World
Noah’s ark: an imaginary of environmentalist discourse
Boarding politics
Loss-bodies
Astronauts on Earth
Abandoning the world: the Noahs
Figures of the world’s refusal
Notes
6 Reforestation without the World (Haiti)
Technocentric discourse and the off-world
Unjustly blaming Maroons and peasants
Reforestation without the world; or, the sacrifice of peasants
The parc de la Visite massacre of July 23rd, 2012
At the origin: colonial inhabitation and the Maroon fracture of the world
World-making to reforest the Earth
Notes
7 Paradise or Hell in the Nature Preserves (Puerto Rico)
Paradise: a colonial laboratory
Vieques: paradisiacal nature reserve or hell
Colonial heterotopia
The violence of the blank page
Notes
8 The Masters’ Chemistry (Martinique and Guadeloupe)
The toxic condition of the Plantationocene
Chlordecone in the French Antilles: toxic forms of violence and domination
A toxic power grab that strengthens colonial inhabitation
The masters’ chemistry and the lie of an astronaut-humanity
Notes
9 A Colonial Ecology: At the Heart of the Double Fracture
Slave-making ecology: environmentalism under the condition of slavery
Plantationary emancipation: an abolition of slavery on the condition of the plantation
A fracture between anticolonialism and modern environmentalism
The Anthropocene’s colonial
oikos
The Negroes of the colonial
oikos
The Anthropocene’s hold
Notes
Part III The Slave Ship: Rising Up from Modernity’s Hold in Search of a World
10 The Slave Ship: Debarking Off-World
The slave ship: the imaginary ark of the Caribbean world
Debarkation politics
Lost bodies
The shipwrecked: off-Earth
The Negro: off-world
Figures of the flight from the world: rising up from the hold
Notes
11 Maroon Ecology: Fleeing the Plantationocene
Marooning the Anthropocene
At the heart of modernity’s double fracture
Touching Earth: Maroon
matrigenesis
Creole metamorphosis: recovering a self, discovering a body
The Maroon’s ecology: protectors of the forests
The Maroonesses
Limits and virtues
Notes
12 Rousseau, Thoreau, and Civil Marronage
John Muir in Cuba: breaking the wall of environmentalism
Rousseau or the Maroon walker
Thoreau cut in two
Thoreau, defender of the Maroons
The enslaved to Black enslavement: the other people enslaved by the Plantationocene
Civil marronage
Civil Maroonesses and the White women against slavery
A civil marronage from the Plantationocene
Notes
13 A Decolonial Ecology: Rising Up from the Hold
From the colonial fracture to the environmental fracture
From the environmental fracture to the colonial fracture
Unsettling
the Anthropocene: the Ayiti hypothesis
Decolonial ecology’s struggles: rising up from the modern hold
Notes
Part IV A World-Ship: World-Making beyond the Double Fracture
14 A World-Ship: Politics of Encounter
Noah’s ark and the slave ship: two wanderings of the same modernity
The environmentalist return: continuing the colonial refusal of the world
Maroon returns: pursuit of the infinite flight from the world
Politics of encounter and the world-ship
Notes
15 Forming a Body in the World: Reconnecting with a Mother-Earth
The fracture of the two bodies
The bellies of the world and the wombs of the Earth
Healing Negro bodies and ecological bodies
Blowing the conch and playing the drum
Notes
16 Interspecies Alliances: The Animal Cause and the Negro Cause
The enslavement of non-human animals
The social and political animalization of Black and other racialized people
Being prey in the concrete jungle
Racism and the animalization of women
One slave-making inhabitation of the Earth
Interspecies alliances against the Plantationocene
Notes
17 A Worldly-Ecology: On the Bridge of Justice
World-making, composing with pluralities
Beyond gestalt ontology and creolization
For doubly relational aesthetics and writing
For a cosmopolitics of relation
On the bridge of justice: climate justice, reparations, and decolonial restitutions
Notes
Epilogue: World-Making in the Face of the Tempest
World-making
The intrusion of Ayiti
Recovering the sun of Africa
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Figure 1 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Ty...
Chapter 2
Figure 2 William Clark, “Cutting the Sugar Cane,” in Ten Views in the Islan...
Chapter 3
Figure 3 Detail from René Lhermitte, Plan, Profile and Layout of the Ship Marie S...
Chapter 4
Figure 4 The cyclones Katia, Irma and José, 8th September 2017, © NOAA sate...
Chapter 6
Figure 5 Thomas Moran,
Slave Hunt, Dismal Swamp
, Virginia, 1861–2.
Figure 6 Soil erosion in Haiti, which maroons towards the sea, 2012. Photo © Malco...
Chapter 8
Figure 7 Banana plantation in Martinique, 2017. Photo © Malcom Ferdinand.
Part 3
Figure 8 Anse Cafard Memorial (Mémorial de l’anse Cafard) in Martinique, sc...
Figure 9 Jason deCaires Taylor,
Vicissitudes
, 2007, © Jason deCaires Taylor...
Chapter 11
Figure 10 Albert Mangonès,
Statue of the Unknown Maroon
(Statue du Marron in...
Chapter 13
Figure 11 Hector Charpentier,
Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery
(Mémorial...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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Series Title
Critical South
The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Series editors: Natalia Brizuela, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and Leticia Sabsay
Leonor Arfuch,
Memory and Autobiography
Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia,
Seven Essays on Populism
Aimé Césaire,
Resolutely Black
Bolívar Echeverría,
Modernity and “Whiteness”
Malcom Ferdinand,
Decolonial Ecology
Celso Furtado,
The Myth of Economic Development
Eduardo Grüner,
The Haitian Revolution
Karima Lazali,
Colonia Trauma
María Pia López,
Not One Less
Pablo Oyarzun,
Doing Justice
Néstor Perlongher,
Plebeian Prose
Bento Prado Jr.,
Error, Illusion, Madness
Nelly Richard,
Eruptions of Memory
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,
Ch’ixinakax utxiwa
Tendayi Sithole,
The Black Register
Maboula Soumahoro,
Black is the Journey, Africana the Name
Decolonial Ecology
Thinking from the Caribbean World
Malcom Ferdinand
Translated by Anthony Paul Smith
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as Une écologie décoloniale: Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen © Editions du Seuil, 2019
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
Excerpt from A Tempest by Aimé Césaire, translated by Richard Miller. Copyright © 1969 by Editions du Seuil. Copyright English translation © 1985 by Richard Miller. Published by Theatre Communications Group. Used by permission of Theatre Communications Group.
Excerpt from Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon. English translation copyright © 2008 by Richard Philcox. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4622-0 hardback
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Table of Ships
Part I The Modern Tempest
Conquérant
Planter
Nègre
La Tempête
Part II Noah’s Ark
Noé
Chasseur
Paraíso
Cavendish
Wildfire
Part III The Slave Ship
Espérance
Escape
Wanderer
Gaïa
Part IV The World-Ship
Rencontre
Corpo Santo e Almas
Baleine
Justice
Epilogue
Soleil d’Afrique
Illustrations
Figure 1 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On, 1840.
Figure 2 William Clark, “Cutting the Sugar Cane,” in Ten Views in the Island of Antigua (London: Thomas Clay, 1823).
Figure 3 Detail from René Lhermitte, Plan, Profile and Layout of the Ship Marie Séraphique of Nantes, c. 1770.
Figure 4 The cyclones Katia, Irma and José, 8th September 2017, © NOAA satellites, GOES-16.
Figure 5 Thomas Moran, Slave Hunt, Dismal Swamp, Virginia, 1861–2.
Figure 6 Soil erosion in Haiti, which maroons towards the sea, 2012. Photo © Malcom Ferdinand.
Figure 7 Banana plantation in Martinique, 2017. Photo © Malcom Ferdinand.
Figure 8 Anse Cafard Memorial (Mémorial de l’anse Cafard) in Martinique, sculpture by Laurent Valère, 1998. Photo © Malcom Ferdinand.
Figure 9 Jason deCaires Taylor, Vicissitudes, 2007, © Jason deCaires Taylor. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor.
Figure 10 Albert Mangonès, Statue of the Unknown Maroon(Statue du Marron inconnu) in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1968. Photo © Marie Bodin.
Figure 11 Hector Charpentier, Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery (Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage), Prêcheur, Martinique. Photo © David Almandin.
Dedication
For my mother Nadiège
and my father Alex
To the struggles of the shipwrecked
and the ecological battles for a common world
Acknowledgments
If writing is a solitary work, these pages are full of the generous inspiration of companions in search of a world-ship. I would like to thank Christophe Bonneuil for welcoming the French edition of this book into Seuil’s “Anthropocène” collection, for his reading advice, and for his enthusiasm for this project. A big thank you to the team at Éditions du Seuil who made this book possible. I would also like to warmly thank the entire team at Polity for providing a welcoming atmosphere for this English translation. A special thank you to Natalia Brizuela and Elise Heslinga, who supported the project from the beginning, and to Anthony Paul Smith for the great care, ingenuity and dedication he showed in the translation of the book, turning this process into a joyful encounter. Thank you to Meghan Skiles and Gerry Regan, librarians at La Salle University’s Connelly Library, who helped track down and scan many of the English translations of the works referenced here. Based on my doctoral thesis, this book owes so much to my late thesis director Étienne Tassin, to his encouragement-rivers, and to his painting of a cosmopolitan horizon for the world. Thank you to the LCSP team at the University of Paris-Diderot and the members of my thesis committee, Catherine Larrère, Bruno Villalba, Émilie Hache, Justin Daniel, and Myriam Cottias, for their encouragement and crucial support after the thesis. Thank you to the Collectivité territoriale Martinique for its support of my thesis and this book project, as well as the Institut des humanités, sciences et sociétés (IHSS) for its support of the French edition by awarding me the Robert Mankin thesis prize for interdisciplinary research.
In the writing and post-thesis journey, I was fortunate to receive various forms of encouragement from colleagues and friends. Thanks to Pierre Charbonnier, Audrey Célestine and Silyane Larcher for opening up possible routes. Thanks to Gert Oostindie, Rosemarijn Hofte, Wouter Veenendaal, Stacey Mac Donald, Sanne Rotmeijer, Jessica Roitman and the whole team of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies for their hospitality within the framework of a postdoctoral fellowship. Thanks to Nathalie Jas, Catherine Cavalin, and the members of the IRISSO whose welcome made it possible for me to prepare this book in agreeable conditions. Thanks to the fellow thinkers whose discussions, criticisms, and re-readings enriched this project: Axelle Ébodé, Yves Mintoogue, Pauline Vermeren, Odonel Pierre-Louis, Jean Waddimir, Jephté Camil, Kasia Mika, Adler Camilus, Margaux Le Donné, Laurence Marty, Gratias Klegui, Fabania Ex-Souza, Sarah Fila-Bakabadio, Kémi Apovo, Trilce Laske, Alizé Berthé, Grettel Navas, Raphaël Lauro, Sonny Joseph, Sada Mire, Angus Martin, Marie Bodin. Thanks to the collective of l’Archipel des devenirs for the philosophical practice of utopia and the utopian accounts of the world. Thank you to the many colleagues encountered in colloquia (they will know who they are), whose discussions have generously nourished this work. Thanks also to the environmental thinkers who initiated these reflections long before me. My disagreements with some of them are nothing more than a mark of respect. Thank you to the staff of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, whose smiles, handshakes, and sympathy pleasantly accompanied my long days. Thank you to friends for their precious companionship: Rudy, Jacques, Fred, Marie-George, Morgane, Mathieu, Régis, Hassan, Ludivine, Sarah, Benjamin, Luce, Davy, Domi, Jean-No, Gaëlle, Christelle, Olivier, Yannick, David, Wilhem, Cédric, and many others. Thank you to the late Lila Chouli, early decolonial ecologist. Thank you Carolin. Thanks to all the Caribbean ecologists, and especially those from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, whom I met during my thesis, and whose struggles for Mother-Earth encouraged me to follow this path.
In a modern world that has constantly reminded me of the inferiority of those with whom I share a Black skin, discovering that you are worthy of love, gifted with words, and capable of thinking is an incommensurable task. Alongside the poets, philosophers, activists, and artists who have guided our Maroon nights and have saved us from infinite bitterness, it was first the fruit of my family that taught me to love and to fight. Love and Fight. Thank you Malik for opening up the literary paths of the world. Thank you Youri, Sonny, Wally, Marvin, Papa Jojo, Isambert Duridveau, Tonton Joseph, Nathalie, Vanessa, Loïc, Tatie Carole, Nicolas, Laurence, Tatie Fofo, Johanne, Sandra & co. Thank you to my brother Jonathan Ferdinand, who left us far too soon, for showing me the power and intelligence of sensitivity. Finally, thank you to my father, Alex Ferdinand, for his volcanic-tchimbé rèd support and to my mother, Nadiège Noël, for her oceanic support and her victorious light over the world.
Foreword
Malcom Ferdinand’s astute analyses in Decolonial Ecology moved me to reflect in myriad ways on many of my own core ideas and life experiences over the decades. I found myself thinking that this is a book I wish I could have read years ago, especially when I was attempting to grasp the interrelationalities of gender, race, and class. And even as I thought about the many ways his theoretical and methodological approach might have advanced our thinking then, I also recognized how perfectly his conceptualizations illuminate the frameworks we need for both philosophical and popular understandings of our planetary conditions today.
Whoever recognizes how entangled we are in the chaos of contemporary racial capitalism with its heteropatriarchal contours, and whoever is attempting to imagine emancipatory futures in ways that do not privilege a single component of the crisis, will greatly benefit from spending time with this remarkable text. Ferdinand calls on us to embrace holistic methods of inquiry and responses to crises grounded in the interdependencies that constitute all of us – plants, human and other animals, the soil, the ocean – while recognizing that racism has deposited white supremacy at the very heart of our notions of the human.
When I initially agreed to write a short foreword for this book, I was thinking about my first visit to Martinique in December 2019, when I learned about the devastating impact of the pesticide chlordecone on the populations of Martinique and Guadeloupe. I still feel the shock I experienced when I wondered why I had not previously known about this calamitous intersection of racial capitalism and systematic assaults on the environment, including its human expressions. Ironically, the banana plant, which chlordecone was designed to protect from weevils, is one of the few products in the food chain that has not been polluted. This is a part of the world with which I have long experienced a deep spiritual kinship through its literature – especially Aimé Césaire and Maryse Condé – and its popular visual art, as I had the good fortune of meeting Euzhan Palcy in Paris shortly after the 1983 release of La Rue Cases-Nègres [Sugar Cane Alley], and I was interested in expanding my awareness about the environmental crisis that is taking place there. As soon as I began to read Decolonial Ecology, I quickly realized that, as important as it may be to learn more about one of the world’s least recognized ecological disasters, Malcom Ferdinand’s research, in closely and complexly engaging with the conditions of the Caribbean and the Americas, radically reframes the way we have been primed to theorize and engage in active protest against assaults on the environment more broadly.
I also found myself overtaken by waves of self-criticism regarding earlier encounters with ways of understanding intersections between antiracism and environmental consciousness. Many years ago, in the immediate aftermath of my own trial and after the successful conclusion of a massive global campaign for my freedom, I helped to establish the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, an organization that continued to advocate for political prisoners and to engage in popular education campaigns about the connections between state violence and structural racism. One of our leaders, now deceased, was a phenomenal organizer named Damu Smith. When he chaired the Washington, DC, chapter of the Alliance, he pushed us early on to incorporate into our efforts what we now refer to as environmental justice. We were largely concerned with contesting political repression and with identifying the persistence of white supremacy and structural racism, especially with respect to the criminal legal system. I continue to regret that we did not then reevaluate the theoretical framework we employed for the understanding of the long history of racial and political repression in the US. Certainly we acknowledged colonialism and slavery as the foundational historical oppressions that enabled the trajectories leading, for example, to the incarceration of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier. But our sense of the damage spawned by colonialism and slavery was not nearly as capacious as it would have been if we had grasped the gravity of the connections Damu was urging us to make.
Eventually Damu Smith became one of the founders of the environmental justice movement, to which Malcom Ferdinand refers. On Earth Day, 2001, he spoke at a protest outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, organized by Greenpeace:
All of us have scores of chemicals in our bodies, in our tissues, in our blood, that come from a host of polluting industries and industrial processes under way throughout the planet. Particularly in the United States and other industrialized countries, we have industries like vinyl and plastic and petrochemical industries that are emitting dangerous toxins that are harming human health and causing many people to die …. We are being poisoned and killed against our will. … While everybody on the planet is suffering from toxic contamination, there are some communities that have been targeted, who as a result of that targeting based on race and income are getting a disproportionate share of the planet’s and the nation’s pollution. People of color, African-American, Latino, Native American, Asian, and poor white folk are getting a disproportionate share of the nation’s pollution. As a result the disease and death in those communities is higher. We have got to oppose and challenge environmental racism. (April 18, 2001: Earth Day protest in Washington organized by Greenpeace)
It is also interesting to note that the term “environmental racism” was coined by Dr Benjamin Chavis, who had been imprisoned in connection with the case of the Wilmington Ten from North Carolina and was freed as a result of an international campaign, supported especially in France, spearheaded by the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. In 1982, he described environmental racism as “racial discrimination in environmental policy-making, the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of colour for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and the history of excluding people of colour from the leadership of the ecology movements” (www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/what-is-environmental-racism-pollution-covid-systemic/).
Environmental racism was and continues to be a crucial concept, one which advances our understandings of the strategic location of dumps and toxic waste sites and other practices that devalue the lives of Black, indigenous and Latinx people. Ferdinand’s work, however, unmasks the logic that impels us to conceptualize assaults on the environment and racist violence as discontinuous and in need of a kind of articulation that preserves the discreteness of the two phenomena to the extent that, when we bring them together in the concept of environmental racism, we tend to misapprehend their deep and fundamental interrelatedness. He asks us not only to acknowledge the part that racism plays in defining who is more vulnerable to environmental pollution but also – and more fundamentally – how racism, and specifically colonialism and slavery, helped to construct a world grounded on environmental destruction. In other words, the racism does not simply enter the picture as a factor determining the way environmental hazards are disparately experienced by human beings but, rather, it creates the very conditions of possibility for sustained assaults on the environment, including on the human and non-human animals, whose lives are always already devalued by racism, patriarchy, and speciesism.
The poisoning of the water supply of Flint, Michigan, in 2014,1 which resulted from the austerity-motivated switch to the Flint River for the city’s water, was clearly linked to capitalist industrialization on land historically stewarded by the Ojibwe. The trajectory that led from the production of carriages to the emergence of the automobile industry with no regard to the deleterious environmental changes included, among other developments, the pollution of the Flint River, especially by General Motors, which is why the river had not been previously considered as a source of water. However, under conditions of austerity, the switch from the Detroit River to the Flint River unleashed a cascade of issues, including the dislodging of lead from the pipes transporting water to the Flint community, where the majority of residents are Black and where over 40 percent live below the poverty line. Revealingly, even before the impact of the lead on the children of Flint was acknowledged, General Motors petitioned to switch back to the Detroit River because the existing supply was corroding engine parts and thus placing the profitability of the company in jeopardy. Apparently it was more important to save the automobile engines than the precious lives of Black children, whose fate recapitulated the violence directed at the Ojibwe people, who were the original inhabitants of the area where the city of Flint is located.
Flint should have been a lesson to the US and to the world that, when Black children’s lives are jeopardized by the logic of contemporary capitalism, there are so many more humans, animals, plants, water, and soil that are cavalierly relegated to the realm of collateral consequences, a term that is also used to reflect the far-reaching ravages of what we have come to call the prison industrial complex. Not long after the Flint calamity, the protests on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation demanding a halt to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline revealed that it had been redirected through the reservation in order to avoid contaminating the water of Bismarck, the capital city of North Dakota, overtly signaling that indigenous lives are inherently less valuable than white lives.
Malcom Ferdinand insists that we not understand such slogans as Indigenous Lives Matter or Black Lives Matter as simple rallying cries that, while certainly meaningful to First Nations people and people of African descent, are otherwise marginal to the project of safeguarding the planet. Instead he encourages us to recognize that the deeper meaning of these assertions is that we cannot retain whiteness and maleness as measures for liberatory futures, even when the presence of such measures is deeply hidden beneath such seductive universalisms as freedom, equality, and fraternity. He recognizes the importance of new frames, new trajectories, and new ways of imagining futures where chemical and ideological toxicities – including insecticides such as chlordecone, along with racism and misogyny – are prevented from polluting our worlds to come.
Angela Y. Davis
Figure 1Joseph Mallord William Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On, 1840.
Notes
1
Laura Pulido, “Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism,”
Capitalism Nature Socialism
27/3 (2016): 1–16; DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2016.1213013.
PrologueA Colonial and Environmental Double Fracture: The Caribbean at the Heart of the Modern Tempest
Of course, we’re only straws tossed on the raging sea … but all’s not lost, gentlemen. We just have to try to get to the eye of the storm.
Aimé Césaire
A Tempest1
A modern tempest
An angry red covers the sky, the waves are rough, the water is rising, the birds are panicking. Swirling winds wrap around the destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems, the enslavement of non-humans, as well as wars, social inequality, racial discrimination, and the domination of women. The sixth mass extinction of species is underway, chemical pollution is percolating into aquifers and umbilical cords, climate change is accelerating, and global justice remains iniquitous. Violence spreads through the crew, chained bodies are thrown overboard, sinking into the marine abyss, while brown hands search for hope. The skies thunder loudly: the world-ship is in the midst of a modern tempest. In the face of this storm, which finds horizons hidden behind the clouds, vision blurred by the salty waters, and cries covered up by unjust gusts, what course can be taken?
This book seeks to chart a new course through the conceptual sea of the Caribbean. For the Europeans of the sixteenth century, the word “Caribbean,” being the name of the first inhabitants of the archipelago, meant savages and cannibals.2 Like the character Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “Caribbean” would refer to an entity devoid of reason. The inspection of this entity by waves of European colonization and their sciences would bring forth economic profits and objective knowledge. This colonial perspective persists today in the touristic representation of the Caribbean as a place where one can take a break on the beach without people and offside to the world. To think ecology from the perspective of the Caribbean world is a reversal of this touristic perspective, driven by the conviction that Caribbean men and women speak, act, and think about the world and inhabit the Earth.3
Many rushed to Noah’s Ark when the ecological flood was announced, with little concern for those abandoned at the dock or those enslaved within the ship. In the face of the ecological storm, saving “humanity” or “civilization” would require leaving the world ashore. This desolating perspective is revealed by the slave ship Zong off the coast of Jamaica in 1781, painted by William Turner and found on the cover of this book. At the mere thought of the storm, some are chained below deck and others are thrown overboard. Environmental collapse does not impact everyone equally and does not negate the varied social and political collapse already underway. A double fracture lingers between those who fear the ecological tempest on the horizon and those who were denied the bridge of justice long before the first gusts of wind. As the eye of the storm, the Caribbean makes it necessary to understand the storm from the perspective of modernity’s hold. Through the Caribbean’s Creole imaginary of resistance and its experiences of (post)colonial struggles, the Caribbean allows for a conceptualization of the ecological crisis that is embedded within the search for a world free of its slavery, its social violence, and its political injustice: a decolonial ecology. This decolonial ecology is a path charted aboard the world-ship towards the horizon of a common world, towards what I call a worldly-ecology. Three philosophical propositions guide the way.
Noah’s ark or the colonial and environmental double fracture
The first proposition is based on the observation of modernity’s colonial and environmental double fracture. This fracture separates the colonial history of the world from its environmental history. This can be seen in the divide between environmental and ecological movements, on the one hand, and postcolonial and antiracist movements, on the other, where both express themselves in the streets and in the universities without speaking to each other. This fracture is also revealed on a daily basis by the striking absence of Blacks and other people of color in the arenas of environmental discourse production, as well as in the theoretical tools used to conceptualize the ecological crisis. With the terms “Black people,” “Red people,” “Arabs,” or “Whites,” far from the a priori essentialization of nineteenth-century scientific anthropology, I am referring to the construction of the racist hierarchy of the West that resulted in many peoples on Earth having the condition of being associated with a race, culminating in the invention of Whites above non-Whites.4 Because of this asymmetry, I refer to those others, non-Whites, by the term “racialized,” for it is their humanity that has been and is being contested by these racial ontologies, and it is they who de facto suffer a discriminatory essentialization.5 Even though this hierarchy is a socio-political construction that no longer has any scientific value, it should not in turn lead to the denial of the ensuing social and experiential realities (for example, by refusing to name them) or the denial of their violence, including when those realities and violence take place within environmental discourses, practices, and policies.6
In the United States, a 2014 study showed that minorities remain under-represented in governmental and non-governmental environmental organizations, with the highest positions held predominately by White, educated, middle-class men.7 A similar situation exists in France. Racialized people who have come as part of colonial and postcolonial migration and who collect the cities’ garbage, clean public squares and institutions, drive buses, trams, and subway trains, the ones who serve hot meals in university dining halls, deliver mail, care for the sick in hospitals, those whose welcoming smiles at the entrance of establishments are a guarantee of security, are the same ones who are usually excluded from the university, governmental, and non-governmental arenas that focus on the state of the environment. As a result, environmental specialists regularly speak at conferences as if all these people, their stories, their suffering, and their struggles remain inconsequential to the way we think about the Earth. This leads to the absurdity that the planet’s preservation is thought about and implemented in the absence of those “without whom,” as Aimé Césaire writes, “the earth would not be the earth.”8 Either this fracture is completely hidden behind the fallacious argument that non-White peoples do not care about the environment, or it is restricted to a subject that is deemed secondary to the “real” purpose of ecology. My proposition here is that this double fracture be positioned as a central problem of the ecological crisis, thereby radically transforming its conceptual and political implications.
On the one hand, the environmental fracture follows from modernity’s “great divide,” those dualistic oppositions that separate nature and culture, environment and society, establishing a vertical scale of values that places “Man” above nature.9 This fracture is revealed through the technical, scientific, and economic modernizations of the mastery of nature, the effects of which can be measured by the extent of the Earth’s pollution, the loss of biodiversity, global warming, and the associated persistence of gender inequality, social misery, and the “disposable lives” that are thereby created.10 The concept of the “Anthropocene,” popularized by Paul Crutzen, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, attests to the consequences of this duality.11 It refers to the new geological era that comes after the Holocene, in which human activities have become a major force impacting the Earth’s ecosystems in a lasting way. This fracture also conceals a horizontal homogenization and hides internal hierarchizations on both sides. On the one side, the terms “planet,” “nature,” or “environment” conceal the diversity of ecosystems, geographic locations, and the non-humans that constitute them. Images of lush forests, snow-capped mountains, and nature reserves mask those of urban natures, slums, and plantations. Also masked are the internal conflicts between nature conservation movements and animal welfare movements, the animal fracture, as well as the latter’s own hierarchies in which “noble” wild animals (polar bears, whales, elephants, or pandas) and pets (dogs and cats) are placed above animals that are farmed (cows, pigs, sheep, or tuna).12 On the other side, the terms “Man” or anthropos mask the plurality of human beings, featuring men and women, rich and poor, Whites and non-Whites, Christians and non-Christians, sick and healthy.
The environmental fracture
I call “environmentalism” the set of movements and currents of thought that attempt to reverse the vertical valuation of the environmental fracture but without touching the horizontal scale of values, meaning without questioning social injustices, gender discrimination, political domination, or the hierarchy of living environments and without concern for the treatment of animals on Earth. Environmentalism therefore proceeds from an apolitical genealogy of ecology comprised of its figures, like the solitary walker, and its pantheon of thinkers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pierre Poivre, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, or Arne Næss.13 They are mainly White, free, solitary, upper-class men in slave-making and post-slavery societies gazing out over what is then referred to as “nature.” Despite disagreements over its definition, environmentalism remains preoccupied with “nature,” cherishing the sweet illusion that its socio-political conditions of access and its sciences might remain outside the colonial fracture.14
Since the 1960s, some ecological movements have been concerned with addressing vertical and horizontal scales of value. Ecofeminism, social ecology, and political ecology have argued for a preservation of the environment intrinsically linked to demands for gender equality, social justice, and political emancipation. Despite their rich contributions, these green interventions make little room for racial and colonial issues. The colonial and slave-making constitution of modernity is veiled by pretentious claims to the universality of socio-economic, feminist, or juridico-political theories. In the green turn of the 1970s, arts and humanities disciplines confronted the environmental fracture while at the same time sliding the colonial divide under the rug. The absence of people of color who are experts on these issues is striking. From universities to governmental and non-governmental arenas, movements critical of the environmental fracture have marked the boundaries of a predominantly White and masculine space within postcolonial, multiethnic, and multicultural countries where the maps of the Earth and the dividing lines of the world are imagined and redrawn.
On the other hand, there is a colonial fracture sustained by the racist ideologies of the West, its religious, cultural, and ethnic Eurocentrism, and its imperial desire for enrichment, the effects of which can be seen in the enslavement of the Earth’s First Peoples, the violence inflicted on non-European women, the wars of colonial conquest, the bloody uprooting of the slave trade, the suffering of colonial slavery, the many genocides and crimes against humanity. The colonial fracture separates humans and the geographical spaces of the Earth between European colonizers and non-European colonized peoples, between Whites and non-Whites, between the masters and the enslaved, between the metropole and the colonies, between the Global North and the Global South. Going back at least to the time of the Spanish Reconquista, when Muslims were expelled from the Iberian peninsula, and the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492, this fracture places the colonist, his history and his desires at the top of the hierarchy of values and subordinates the lives and lands of the colonized or formerly colonized under him.15 In the same way, this fracture renders the colonists as homogeneous, reduces them to the experience of a White man, while at the same time reducing the experience of the colonized to that of a racialized man. Throughout the complex history of colonialism, this line has been contested by both sides and has taken different forms.16 Nevertheless, it persists today, reinforced by free markets and capitalism.
The colonial fracture
From the first acts of resistance by Amerindians and the enslaved in the fifteenth century to contemporary antiracist movements and anticolonial struggles in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, this colonial fracture is being called into question, exposing the vertical valorization of the colonized by the colonist. Anticolonialism, antislavery, and antiracism together represent the actions and currents of thought deconstructing this vertical scale of values. History has shown, however, that these movements have not always challenged the horizontal scale of values that in places maintains the relationships of domination between men and women, rich and poor, urban dwellers and peasants, Christians and non-Christians, Arabs and Blacks, among the colonized as well as among the colonists. In response, movements such as Black feminism and decolonial theory shatter both vertical and horizontal value scales, linking decolonization to the emancipation of women, recognition of different sexual orientations and different religious faiths, as well as to social justice. However, the ecological issues of the world remain relegated to the background.
The double fracture of modernity refers to the thick wall between the two environmental and colonial fractures, to the real difficulty that exists in thinking them together and that in response carries out a double critique. However, this difficulty is not experienced in the same way on either side, and these two fields do not bear equal responsibility for it. On the environmentalist side, this difficulty stems from an effort to hide colonization and slavery within the genealogy of ecological thinking, producing a colonial ecology, even a Noah’s Ark ecology. With the concept of the Anthropocene, Crutzen and others promote a narrative about the Earth that erases colonial history, while the country of which Crutzen is a citizen, the kingdom of the Netherlands, is a former colonial and slaveholding empire that stretched from Suriname to Indonesia via South Africa, and now consists of six overseas territories in the Caribbean.17
In metropolitan France [France hexagonale], or the Hexagone, environmentalist movements have not made anticolonial and antiracist struggles central elements of the ecological crisis.18 These struggles remain anecdotal or are even ignored within the extensive critiques of technology (including of nuclear power) carried out by Bernard Charbonneau, Jacques Ellul, André Gorz, Ivan Illich, Edgar Morin, and Günther Anders. The damage caused by nuclear tests carried out on colonized lands, such as the 210 French tests in Algeria and those in Polynesia from 1960 to 1996, is downplayed, but so is the damage caused by the plundering of mines in Africa by Great Britain and France and by the exploitation of the subsoil of Aboriginal lands in Australia, the First Nations in Canada, the Navajos in the United States, and of the Black workers forced to extract uranium in apartheid South Africa.19 In addition to transforming the Hexagone, nuclear energy has relied on France’s colonial empire, using mines in Gabon, Niger, and Madagascar – which have long been in use throughout Françafrique – while exposing miners to uranium and radon gas.20 To disavow this colonial fact is to cover up the opposition to nuclear power that has been voiced by anticolonial movements, such as the demand for disarmament made by the Bandung Conference of 1955, or Kwame Nkrumah, Bayard Rustin, and Bill Sutherland’s pan-Africanist rejection of “nuclear imperialism” and French nuclear tests in Algeria, or Frantz Fanon’s denunciation of a nuclear arms race that maintains the Third World’s domination, or the contemporary demands for justice by Polynesians.21 By omitting the colonial conditions for the production of technology, environmentalist movements have missed possible alliances with anticolonial critiques of technology.
Certainly, there were some bridges that were built in light of René Dumont’s commitments to the peasants of the Third World, Robert Jaulin and Serge Moscovici’s denunciations of the ethnocides of the Amerindians and their collaboration with the group “Survivre et vivre” [Survive and live], which led to a critique of the scientific imperialism that serves the West and the rare support of overseas citizens.22 Today, Serge Latouche is one of the few people in France who has placed the decolonial demand at the heart of ecological issues.23 Despite these rare examples, colonized others have not had important speaking roles within the French environmentalist movement, cast away with “their” history to a distant beyond that is reinforced by the illusion of a North/South dichotomy. The result is a sympathy-without-connection [sympathie-sans-lien] where the concerns of others that are “over there” are recognized without acknowledging the material, economic, and political connections to the “here.” It is taken as self-evident that the history of environmental pollution and the environmentalist movements “in France” does not include its former colonies and overseas territories,24 that the history of ecological thinking continues to be conceived of without any Black thinkers,25 that the word “antiracism” is not part of the ecological vocabulary,26 and, above all, that these absences do not pose any problems. With expressions such as “climate refugees” and “environmental migrants,” green activists appear to be discovering the migratory phenomenon in a panic, while they make a tabula rasa out of France’s historical colonial and postcolonial migrations from the Antilles, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. So, it remains a cognitive and political embarrassment to recognize that French overseas territories are home to 80 percent of France’s national biodiversity and 97 percent of its maritime exclusive economic zone, without addressing the fact that the inhabitants there are kept in poverty and on the margins of France’s political and imaginary representations.27 Aside from such sympathies-without-connection, the encounter between environmentalist movements and thought of the Hexagone with the colonial history of France and its “other citizens” has not yet taken place.28
As Kathryn Yusoff notes, this invisibilization results in a “White Anthropocene,” the geology of which erases the histories of non-Whites, and a Western imaginary of the “ecological crisis” that erases colonial experiences.29 A colonial arrogance persists on the part of present-day “collapsologists” when they talks about a new collapse while concealing the connections that exist to modern colonization, slavery, and racism, the genocides of indigenous peoples, and the destruction of their environments.30 In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond describes the postcolonial societies of Haiti and Rwanda through a condescending exoticism that places them in a distant off-world [hors-monde] and that does not include any scientists or thinkers from these countries.31 These people, who are “more African in appearance” according to Diamond, are reduced to the role of victims who lack knowledge.32 The colonial constitution of the world and the resulting inequalities are passed over in silence.33 The Anthropocene’s claim to universality seems to be sufficient to dismiss critics of the West’s discriminatory universalism.34 Could it really be that a global enterprise, which from the fifteenth to the twentieth century was predicated upon the exploitation of humans and non-humans, including the decimation of millions of indigenous people in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, the forced transportation of millions of Africans, and centuries-long slavery, has no material or philosophical relationship with ecological thinking today? Are the ecological crisis and the Anthropocene new expressions of the “White man’s burden” to save “Humanity” from itself?35Fracture.
On the other side, the racialized and the subalterns who are met with repeated refusals of the world feel this double fracture every day in their flesh and in their stories. W. E. B. Du Bois’s “veil” expanded upon by Paul Gilroy’s “double consciousness of modernity,” Enrique Dussel’s “underside of modernity,” and the “White masks” on Fanon’s Black skin or Glen Coulthard’s Red skin are only different ways of describing this violence.36 From 1492 to today, we must bear in mind the incommensurable resistance and struggles on the part of colonized and enslaved men and women in demanding humane treatment, to engage in a profession, to preserve their families, to participate in public life, to practice their arts, their languages, to pray to their gods, and to sit at the same world table. Yet those who carry the weight of the world see their struggles, like the Haitian Revolution, silenced.37 In these pursuits of dignity – those that focus primarily on issues of identity, equality, sovereignty, and justice – environmental issues are perceived as an extension of colonial domination that fortifies the holds, exacerbates the suffering of racialized people, the poor, and women, and sustains colonial silence.
A dangerous alternative emerges. Either this legitimate mistrust of environmentalism leads to the neglect of the dangers of environmental devastations of the Earth. Ecological struggles would then be a matter of “white utopia,” or at the very least unimportant when faced with the immense task of reclaiming dignity.38 Or, paradoxically, in their laudable calls for ecological sensitivity, postcolonial thinkers such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Souleymane Bachir Diagne will have discarded their critical theoretical tools and adopted the same environmentalist terms, scales, and historicities, such as, for example, “global subject,” “whole Earth,” and “humanity in general.”39 The durability of the psychological, socio-political, and ecosystemic violence and toxicity of the “ruins of empires” is concealed.40 Likewise, one underestimates the colonial ecology of racial ontologies that always links the racialized and the colonized to those psychic, physical, and socio-political spaces that are the world’s holds. This is true whether it is a matter of the spaces of legal and political non-representation (the enslaved), the spaces of non-being (the Negro), the spaces of the absence of logos, history, or culture (the savage), the spaces of the non-human (the animal), the spaces of the inhuman (the monster, the beast), the spaces of the non-living (camps and necropolises), or, if it is a matter of geographical locations (Africa, the Americas, Asia, Oceania), of habitat zones (ghettos, suburbs) or of ecosystems subject to capitalist production (slave ships, tropical plantations, factories, mines, prisons). In turn, the importance of ecological and non-human concerns within (post)colonial struggles for equality and dignity remain understated. Fracture.
Here is the double fracture. One either questions the environmental fracture on the condition that the silence of modernity’s colonial fracture, its misogynistic slavery, and its racisms are maintained, or one deconstructs the colonial fracture on the condition that its ecological issues are abandoned. Yet, by leaving aside the colonial question, ecologists and green activists overlook the fact that both historical colonization and contemporary structural racism are at the center of destructive ways of inhabiting the Earth. Leaving aside the environmental and animal questions, antiracist and postcolonial movements miss the forms of violence that exacerbate the domination of the enslaved, the colonized, and racialized women. As a result of this double fracture, Noah’s Ark is established as an appropriate political metaphor for the Earth and the world in the face of the ecological tempest, locking the cries for a common world at the bottom of modernity’s hold.
The slave ship or modernity’s hold
In order to heal this double fracture, my second proposition takes the Caribbean world as the scene of ecological thinking. Why the Caribbean? Firstly, because it was here that the Old World and the New World were first knotted together in an attempt to make the Earth and the world into one and the same totality. Eye of modernity’s hurricane, the Caribbean is that center where the sunny lull was wrongly confused for paradise, the fixed point of a global acceleration sucking up African villages, Amerindian societies, and European sails. This “Caribbean world” therefore concentrates experiences of the world that range from colonial and enslaving histories to the underside of modernity, histories which are not limited to the geographical boundaries of the Caribbean basin. This gesture is a response to the absence of these Caribbean experiences within those ecological discourses that nevertheless claim to question the same modernity. While researchers have been interested in the ecological consequences of colonization in the Caribbean and North America, the consequences of global warming, and contemporary environmental politics, the Caribbean is most often seen as the place for experimenting with concepts that come from somewhere else.41 The colonial gaze is maintained by the scholar who departs from the Global North and carries in his suitcase concepts that are to be experimented with in a non-scholarly Caribbean, before he leaves again with the fruits of this new knowledge, now capable of prescribing the way forward. Such an approach hides the imperial conditions that allowed, in the Caribbean and other colonial spaces, the development of sciences such as botany, the emergence of forest conservation management,42 and the genesis of the concept of biodiversity,43 and ignores the other forms of knowledge concerning the environment and the body that were already there.44 Above all, one would miss those Caribbean ecologists who go “beyond sand and sun” by holding together social justice, antiracism, and ecosystem preservation.45
A contrario, I embrace the Caribbean world as a scene of ecological thinking. Thinking ecology from the perspective of the Caribbean world proposes an epistemic shift in the conceptualizations of theworld and the Earth at the heart of ecology, meaning that there is a change of scene from which discourses and knowledge are produced. Instead of the scene of a free, educated, and well-to-do White man wandering the countryside of Georgia like John Muir, or in the forest of Montmorency like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or around Walden’s pond like Henry David Thoreau, I suggest another scene that took place historically at the same time: one of violence inflicted upon men and women in slavery, dominated socially and politically inside the holds of slave ships. North–South power relations, racisms, historical and modern slavery, the resentments, fears, and hopes that constitute the experience of the world, are placed at the heart of the ship where the ecological tempest is seen and confronted.
Within a binary understanding of modernity, one that opposes nature and culture, colonists and indigenous people, this proposition instead highlights the experiences of modernity’s third terms.46 I am referring to those who were dismissed when, in the sixteenth century, the priest Bartolomé de Las Casas, famous in the Valladolid controversy of 1550, defended the Amerindians against the Spanish conquerors with an appeal that was accompanied by repeated suggestions to “stock up” in Africa and develop triangular trade.47 Neither modern nor indigenous, more than 12.5 million Africans were uprooted from their lands from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Hundreds of millions of people were enslaved and kept for centuries in an off-ground [hors-sol] relationship to the Americas.48 Over and above the social conditions of the colonial enslaved, they were also considered “Negroes,” object-beings of a political and scientific racism that indexes them to an inextricable immanence with nature or to an unsurpassable pathological irresponsibility. However, the so-called Negroes also developed relationships with nature, ecumenes, ways of relating to non-humans, and ways of representing the world to themselves. It so happens that these ideas and practices were marked by slavery, by the experience of transshipment in the Atlantic slave trade, and by political and social discrimination for several centuries in Africa, Europe, and the Americas.49 Yes, there is also an ecology of the enslaved, of those transshipped in the European trade, an ecology that maintains continuities with the indigenous African and Amerindian communities but is not reducible to either of them.50 An ecology that was forged in modernity’s hold: a decolonial ecology.
Decolonial ecology articulates the confrontation of contemporary ecological issues through an emancipation from the colonial fracture, by rising up from the slave ship’s hold. The urgency of the struggle against both global warming and the pollution of the Earth is intertwined with the urgency of political, epistemic, scientific, legal, and philosophical struggles to dismantle the colonial structures of living together and the ways of inhabiting the Earth that still maintain the domination of racialized people, particularly women, in modernity’s hold. This decolonial ecology is inspired by the decolonial thinking that was begun by a group of Latin American researchers and activists, such as Anibal Quijano, Arturo Escobar, Catherine Walks, and Walter Mignolo, who were and are working to dismantle an understanding of power, knowledge, and Being that has been inherited from colonial modernity and its racial categories. They emphasize those other ways of thinking that emerge from “the spaces that have been silenced, repressed, demonized, devaluated by the triumphant chant of self-promoting modern epistemology, politics, and economy and its internal dissensions.”51
The decolonial ecology that I am proposing is different from this current of thought because the central focus is on the experiences of the third terms of modernity and the slave ship, the fundamental experiences of those Black Africans now in the Caribbean who were uprooted from Africa and enslaved.52 This gesture is linked to Africana philosophy, which allows the thinking to resurface, history, and philosophies of Africans and African Americans and is represented by the work of Valentin Mudimbé, Cheikh Anta Diop, Cedric Robinson, Sylvia Wynter, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Lewis Gordon, and Norman Ajari.53 Decolonial ecology aims to restore Black people’s dignity in the wake of the battles waged by Aimé Césaire and Maryse Condé, by Toussaint Louverture and Rosa Parks, by Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X, by Frantz Fanon and Christiane Taubira. Finally, thinking from within the slave ship’s hold is also a matter of gender. The separation that often took place inside the hold, where men are placed on one side and women and children on the other, underlines the different forms of oppression these third terms experience. Decolonial ecology fully agrees with feminist and, singularly, Black feminist critiques that show the intricacies of gendered domination within the racist constitutions of nation-states, critical work such as that of Elsa Dorlin, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Eleni Varikas, bell hooks, and Angela Y. Davis.54
This is not an ecology that is to be applied to people of color and formerly colonized territories, like an additional shelf on a bookcase that is already established, as has been proposed by some.55 Decolonial ecology shatters the environmentalist framework for understanding the ecological crisis by including from the outset this confrontation with the world’s colonial fracture and by pointing to another genesis of ecological concern. In this way, I agree with the advances of the environmental justice movements56 and postcolonial ecocriticism.57 The concepts of “environmental racism,” “environmental colonialism,” “ecological imperialism,” and “green orientalism” describe how environmental pollution and degradation, as well as certain preservation politics, reinforce domination over the poor and racialized.58 The critique of the destruction of the planet’s ecosystems is then intimately tied to the critique of colonial and postcolonial dominations and to demands for equality. It is just such an ecologico-political struggle that the Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain staged in his 1944 Gouverneurs de la rosée (translated into English by Langston Hughes as
