Colonial crises of imagination,climate fictions,and English literary education

Abstract

This paper argues that the contemporary climate crises we see around our planet correlate with a colonial crisis of (literary) imagination. The author engages with Caribbean literary scholar Sylvia Wynter and other anti-colonial scholars to trace how the colonial literary imagination is rooted in the euro-western humanism and racial capitalism that governs the west, the stories and literary forms that frame it, and whose logics continue to be rehearsed across the disciplines—particularly in English literatures taught in school. The paper then argues that to understand the histories of this crisis of imagination and its link to climate crises, and perhaps paradoxically access literature’s speculative potential to imagine different climate futures, literary educators and scholars need to prioritize literatures and literary critiques that are embedded in a different relationship to the imagination and ecology.

Introduction

In recent years, with the rise of environmental critique in the humanities and social sciences, climate fiction or ‘cli-fi’ texts have begun to proliferate across media, many of which are set in ecological dystopias. Climate fiction texts, like other speculative fiction texts, often describe these climatic and social-political dystopias as “manifesting concomitant with the global market expansion of late capitalism, hyper-media, environmental degradation, genetic engineering, and neo-Imperialism” (Truman, 2019a). Both in the worlds depicted in climate fictions and in real life, there’s an ongoing reckoning that the possibility of any human future is tethered to questions of sustainability and whether we’re going to be able to mitigate the human-made environmental crises in which we find ourselves (de Freitas and Truman, 2020, 2020b). ¹ English literary study in schools has historically been framed as a subject that uses stories to activate the imagination as a way of teaching students about the world. Increasingly, scholars and pedagogues of English education have argued that foregrounding texts that engage with questions of anthropogenic climate change and interrogate the effects of environmental racism may offer methods for critiquing the present and potentially imagining different climate futures (Phillips et al., 2022).

When considering the human-made climate crisis, cultural geographers, climate scholars, and anti-colonial philosophers have argued that along with being a scientific event, conceptualizing and making sense of the climate crisis may require a reconfiguring of predominant (humanist) social-cultural imaginaries, the imagination, and arts (for example see: Ghosh, 2016; Latour, 2017; Whyte, 2018; Yusoff and Gabrys, 2011). Contributing to these discussions in literary education, as part of this special issue on ‘Climate Change and Educational Research,’ I argue that the contemporary climate crises we see around the globe (temperature extremes, environmental degradation, water and food insecurity, natural disasters, coral bleaching, arctic melting etc.) correlate with a crisis of imagination. I draw on interdisciplinary scholars in the environmental humanities, literary scholars, and authors to trace a history of how a crisis of a particular form of the imagination, or what I’m specifying as a colonial crisis of imagination has deeply influenced our world order and the literatures we read and teach. I engage with Caribbean literary scholar Sylvia Wynter’s writings and other contemporary scholars to demonstrate how this colonial literary imagination is rooted in European humanism and the racial capitalism that governs what is known as the west’s episteme (order of knowledge), the stories and literary forms that frame it, and whose logics continue to be rehearsed across the disciplines, particularly English literatures taught as part of the school curriculum. I then argue that to understand the histories of this colonial crisis of imagination and its link to cascading climate crises, and (perhaps paradoxically) access literature’s speculative potential to imagine different climate futures, literary educators and scholars need to prioritize literatures and literary critiques that are embedded in a different relationship to the imagination and ecology. In conclusion, I briefly engage with the novella Slave Old Man by Caribbean author Patrick Chamoiseau as an anti-exemplar literary text that both critiques and operates beyond the euro-western cultural imaginary and is written within a particular ecological setting that draws attention to the roots of plantation capitalism. I wrestle with the paradox using the literary imagination to unsettle the function of the literary imagination from my limited position within my inherited context, aware of how whiteness and colonialism’s gravities and epistemologies continue to govern literary education.

Caught in a bad (master) imaginary: Humanism (and its alignment with capital)

I will return to the paradox of invoking the human imagination (specifically through literature) as a way of interrogating how a particular version of the human imagination correlates with contemporary climate crises. But first I will discuss the problem of the human and his imaginaries more broadly. I want to state explicitly, that this version of the human is only a version—as Sylvia Wynter argues, only one genre—of the human. However, his primacy has featured in English literature texts taught in school as if he were universal. And indeed humanism’s world order still has a strong influence into how assessment procedures, curricula, and the process of schooling operate in English literary education (Green and Cormack, 2008; Phillips et al., 2022; Thomas, 2015; Truman, 2019c).

Euro-western humanism has been tied to the practice of education and curricula for more than two millennia: ancient Greek and Roman philosophers introduced the idea alongside discussions of human choice, reasoning, and morality as well as the argument for liberal education for some (human) subjects (not slaves or women etc.). Nearly, 2000 years later, during the Renaissance and then ‘Enlightenment’ era, scholars and scientists ‘heretically’ turned away from the Christian theological tradition that had ruled Europe, and inspired by ancient writings, the humanism of antiquity was reborn. Renaissance humanists argued that humans had the capacity to reason, inquire about the world and make decisions and laws without reference to theology or God. These humanist ideals were implemented in educational curricula known as the Studia Humanitatis. This is the humanism that most of us in white euro-western places continue to perpetuate through our education systems and adherence to social norms in everyday life (along with a 500-year extension and permutation of various branches of Christianity); it’s a system that continues to value some forms of (human) life over others.

Wynter (2003) is now frequently cited around her postulation of the signifier ‘Man’ to describe an overrepresented version of the human who epitomizes the human/humanism of the white euro-western enlightenment subject and his footnotes. Wynter outlines how ‘Man’ emerged through modes of being human that occurred through epochal ruptures in Euro-western history. Homo politicus (Man1), coincided with the “Enlightenment” of the 18th century as a break away from medieval theocracy; Homo oeconomicus (Man2), coincided with the Darwinian influence of natural selection and rise of industrial capitalism in the 19th century. But it’s important to recognize that ‘Man’ is only one version of human: he may appear to claim the “monopoly of humanity” (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: p. 66) and is foregrounded in the literatures we read, but he’s not the only human around. ² However, a crisis of (human) imagination over time has configured, represented, and re-affirmed the world into this humanist image so convincingly that it may appear to many of us to be the ‘natural’ or ‘universal’ order of things. But we have never been universal.

Other imaginaries suffuse our present alongside, and perhaps inextricably linked with, euro-western humanism, such as capitalism (which Wynter conceptualised as homo oeconomicus, or economic Man: described above). The overrepresentation ³ and dominance of homo economicus is a reality that Wynter argues has ‘bewitched’ us (Wynter, 1971). In our bewitched reality the euro-western world typifies what Fisher (2009) calls capitalistic realism. For Fisher (2009), capitalistic realism describes the prevailing notion that accepts capitalism as foundational for how politics and economics function; and more significantly, the reckoning that we’ve grown so used to this reality that it has become difficult to even imagine or conject an alternative world that isn’t governed by capitalism. This tendency towards a capitalistic realism governs much contemporary thought, even in how education works (through competition, individualism, and the narrative that self-actualization within this system is meritocratic). Fisher goes as far as saying that “[c]apitalist realism is not a particular type of realism, it is more like realism in itself” (p. 4). And arguably the notion of realism is itself embedded in a white euro-western tradition aligned with humanism and its certainties. And so, we might say, we don’t question certainty of a particular reality (humanism) because we don’t know it’s there (or doesn’t have to be there, more to the point).

The colonial crisis of imagination refers to cascading results (realities) of a crisis of a particular version of the human imagination that’s been reaffirmed for more than 400 years. It is the humanism that developed alongside transatlantic slavery, global Imperialism, and capitalism, and continues to be supported by cis-heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and ableism. This version of humanism has influenced all the disciplines that we call the humanities (and their science siblings), propping up certain versions of the human, and often rendering others as less-than-human. This has been highlighted by many scholars including how this world order has influenced economics (Williams, 2022), science (McKittrick, 2021), social sciences and anthropology (Todd, 2016; Tuck and Yang, 2014), language studies (Flores and Rosa, 2019), geology (Yusoff, 2018), literary studies (Wynter, 1971), computing (Benjamin, 2019) and the fields of education and curriculum studies (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2015; Snaza and Weaver, 2014; Truman, 2022). As King (2019) argues, this cultural discourse operates as a “recursive feedback loop that justifies and legitimizes itself while hiding the ways that humans are both produced by (written by) and produce these codes” (King, 2019: p. 76). These orders of knowledge are reproduced, justified, and continually reaffirmed across literature, culture, and science.

By way of a literary example, consider the French theatrical concept of Vraisemblance, or the ‘likeliness to be true’ (i.e., the fictional tale should be realistic enough to be believable). Arguably this technique’s efficacy is left to the reader/viewer to decide. But what if the order of reality of the reader is already so suffused with euro-western humanism that rupturing it seems implausible from within this system? What if the people in the story can breathe under water? Or walk on the clouds? Or commune with stones? Do the texts get dubbed ‘magic’ rather than ‘realistic?’ Literary study is full of measuring devices such as Vraisemblance that those of us in the field use to demarcate the kind or genre of text we’re studying, its perceived value, and whether we find it compelling or even literary. Is ‘literariness’ itself an inherently humanist/colonial concept in the field of English literature? The way books circulate in the English curriculum and the stories that are privileged reproduces a literary canon that continues to exclude many of the world’s literatures, as many anti-colonial literary studies scholars and authors around the globe have argued for decades (Achebe, 1977; Morrison, 1992; p’Bitek, 1972; Spivak, 1988; Wynter, 1989). The ways in which some forms of literary writing have been designated as sub genres – such as literatures geographically south of Florida often being described as the sub-genre ‘magic realism’ – is an example of this ongoing exclusion (and exoticisation) in literary studies in school. ⁴ As described above with regards to Wynter’s genres of the human, it’s not so much the idea of genres that is the problem, it’s the idea that there’s a quintessential non-genre (of Man, or of Literature) that others are measured against, excluded from, and forever-not-quite.

English literature of all subjects in school has helped develop the argument that the white cis-usually-male protagonist’s story is the universal story. As stated above, this certainty has been questioned by many anti-colonial literary critics, yet his stories continue to dominate literary study in high schools (Patel, 2016; Truman, 2019b). English literature as a school subject has inscribed the logic of the human (Man) since its inception. While English studies specialists and educators have debated the purpose of literary study as a moral force, a pure form, or a functional tool for building a more literate workforce, English literary education in school is still frequently positioned as an arena where through engagement with ‘universal’ stories written in and about the predominant cultural imaginary, students become encultured into it and become better ‘citizens.’ Peter Widdowson articulates the original aim of the English literary canon as an ideological initiative to ‘“humanise” and “civilise” potentially disruptive elements in a developing class-stratified society’ (Atherton, 2005: p. 13). This ‘civilizing’ process is further evidenced in the ongoing reproduction and re-enactment of the literary canon in places such as formerly British-occupied India, and ongoing settler colonial states like Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand, demonstrating the power of literature in schools to uphold and enforce a particular cultural imaginary though literary study, despite many teachers and pedagogues across these regions attempting to intervene in the future of English (Bliss and Bacalja, 2021; McLean Davies et al., 2020; Rackley et al., 2022).

Euro-western literary history is steeped in humanism, and humanism is inextricably linked with climate crises; this makes English literary study an important space in which to engage students in thinking about climate justice, and perhaps paradoxically use the literary arts to denaturalize the humanist imagination and its dominant ideologies. In the next section, I focus on scholars whose works have drawn attention to the relationship between racial capitalism and ecology in literature in the Caribbean and offered both critiques of the prevailing euro-western episteme and glimpses of writing and living beyond it. Although there is a surge in interest in climate fictions in schools, anti-colonial, Caribbean, and Indigenous literatures that prioritize climate, land, and sustainability are often elided from curricular engagement. I argue that engaging in these works is integral for English literary scholars, pedagogues, and students who want to understand some of the foundational issues governing anthropogenetic climate crises and climate emergencies.

The ‘bewitched reality’ of plantation capitalism: Linking the literary with climate crises

Transdisciplinary geophilosopher Kathryn Yusoff’s ongoing work in geology, climate change, and the arts articulates how the climate crisis is historically grounded in (and still driven by) racialized extractive logics that operate through industries such as plantations and mining and fuel the global circulation of capital (Yusoff, 2013, 2015, 2021). Understanding that racial justice is a pre-condition to climate justice, Yusoff frequently examines literary texts such as Caribbean poetry and climate fictions to demonstrate how anthropogenic climate change is imbricated with (neo)imperialism and capitalism (Yusoff, 2019). This transdisciplinary approach to climate justice and the literary arts is in conversation with Caribbean poets, Indigenous authors, and critical Blackness studies scholars (Césaire, 2000; DeLoughrey, 2019; McKittrick, 2011; Whyte, 2018; Wynter, 1984) who remember colonial pasts through literary engagement, while affirming the existence of other climate realisms and poetics outside of the universalized euro-western narrative. Inspired and indebted to this transdisciplinary work, ⁵ this section engages with some of the historical links between literature, plantation capitalism, and climate crises put forth by scholars focused on the Caribbean region and Caribbean diasporic literatures.

Caribbean scholar Sylvia Wynter (1971) tracks the historical development of the novel as a form of literature as inextricably linked to plantation societies in the Caribbean wherein the novel and plantation operate as “twin children of the same parents” (p. 95). Those parents are racial capitalism and the euro-western humanism that features in the novel, but also, as Wynter argues can be subverted by the novel form; this subversive potential significant when thinking about the power of stories to unsettle our prevailing order. Wynter draws on literary scholar Lucien Goldmann who states that the novel “…appears to us to be in effect, a transposition on the literary plane, of daily life within an individualist society, born of production for the market” (Goldmann as cited in Wynter, 1971: p. 95): in other words, the narratives foregrounded in many ‘great’ novels prioritized the image of a self-actualized, imperial (usually male) self, untethered from the social conditions that create the world that others are subjected to. Specifically, Wynter focuses on the emergence of plantation societies and the monoculture growing of crops for their exchange value (rather than use value) as part of the colonial apparatus that has over time developed into a global system that helped fuel the climate crises we are now in. The plantation’s monocultural “Euclidean grids” were as DeLoughrey (2019) states, developed as the “commodity cultivation of nonsustainable crops such as sugar and tobacco for external markets” (p. 39). Crops had never been grown in this way on this scale before on Earth. Transatlantic slavery and the establishment of plantation societies transplanted people across vast geographies, and through extractive logics rearranged the relationship between both people and land as resources (Yusoff, 2018) which over time, on a global scale also re-ordered “imaginative capacities” (Jackson, 2016; np.) As Wynter (1971) argues, this new order created cultural imaginary within which “we are all, without exception still ‘enchanted,’ imprisoned…in its bewitched reality” (Wynter, 1971: p. 95). Wynter extends this arguing that even when plantations were abolished, some of their logics persist into the city – the “commercial expression of the plantation” (p. 102) and the masses whose lives are transposed from the plot to the margins of the city making up those who defend and challenge this ‘bewitched reality.’

The main engine of this bewitched reality is racial capitalism (including Indigenous genocide and displacement, and transatlantic slavery), and Wynter’s work is particularly important for those of us in literary education in how she links literature and literariness to how this bewitched reality developed and is sustained – which is an extension of her argument for the development of ‘Man,’ as rational. As discussed above, Wynter (1984) outlines ‘Man1’ as becoming rational during the Enlightenment where an alignment with reason marked a ‘heretical’ break from religious theism that ordered thought and the cultural imaginary of the dark ages. In this era, secularism began to flourish, and the idea of ‘rational’ Man and the ‘humanities’ began to flourish, but they flourished in conjunction with the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism around the world. The rise of the humanities, and humanism saw white, male, Euro-western thinkers “liberate themselves from theological binds” while failing to upturn “the Othering practices they inherited from medieval Christianity” (Truman, 2019b: p. 112). Later, what Wynter calls Man2 developed through the establishment of plantation cultures and capitalism and literary forms. While discussing European ‘exploration’ (imperialism), transatlantic slavery, and the establishment of plantations in the Americas and the effect on the global imagination, Wynter (1984) argues:

It was to be an utterly new way of feeling, of imagining Self and World, and a mode of imagination that would no longer find its referential figurative auctoritas in the great religious schemas and symbols, but rather in a new referential figurative auctoritas, that of the fictional poetic/dramatic schemas of the phenomenon we call “literature” (p. 33).

Wynter (1984) discusses how “literary studies came to play a specific role/function in the overall schema of the new episteme” (p. 46): the ‘new episteme,’ meaning a euro-western humanist order of knowledge and its imaginary, which as described above centres a particular version of the human at the exclusion and debasement of others. A such, the development of the novel and literary arts is co-imbricated with racial capitalism and the world order that brought us climate crisis: we are literally and figuratively and historically and presently in colonial crisis of imagination – a crisis of what can be imagined within this system and imaginary that’s unfolded in the west over the past 400 years. The novel as form and idea is a product of the “market economy,” its “exchange structure,” and narrative structure of the “individual set free to realize his individuality by the ‘liberal’ values of individualism” (Wynter, 1971: p. 99). Zakiyyah Iman Jackson highlights how within this historical context novels with “imperial thematics and speculative elements” such as Robinson Crusoe, The Blazing World, and Don Quxiote “inaugurate a new literary form” (Jackson, 2016: np). The euro-western novel and individualistic narratives of exploration and overcoming still feature as the prevailing narrative form in stories studied in English classes in schools. However, as Wynter (1971) argues, there’s many kinds of novels. She says, “the novel form is in essence a question mark” (p. 98). This means that as a form, the novel can be used, and has been used to tell different kinds of stories, as I’ll briefly discuss below with the text Slave Old Man. Although the novel as form was born alongside racial capitalism, environmental degradation, and the market economy, Wynter argues it (and other literatures) also developed within the Caribbean and beyond as a “form of resistance to the market society. In effect, the novel form and the novel is the critique of the very historical process which has brought it to such heights of fulfillment” (Wynter, 1971: p. 97). In short, Wynter is arguing that although literature, and the form of the novel itself played an integral role in the establishment of the euro-western episteme (epistemology or order of knowledge), literature, and literary forms have also played a subversive role in unsettling euro-western culture and thriving in spaces beyond it.

Plot and plantation as figurative and literal spaces

Wynter explores how the novel and other forms of literature can function as an alternative form, specifically in Caribbean writings, through her explication of the figurative and actual spaces of slaves’ plots and masters’ plantations. The plantations first established in the Caribbean housed homogenous monocrops grown through enslaved human labour for export overseas and were extremely detrimental to the soil and those who toiled in it through extractive overproduction. On the other hand, the slave plots were lands where the enslaved grew foods for themselves as provision, locally and on a smaller scale (Wynter, 1971). These geographic (and socio-cultural-psychic spaces) offer dialectic imaginaries that are directly linked to land and climate historically as well as the present-day climate disasters the world has been building towards for centuries. Wynter discusses how the slaves’ plots or provision grounds were the “the roots of culture,” a meeting place, where yams were grown and a folk order flourished away from “the superstructure of [eurowestern] civilization” (Wynter, 1971: p. 100). The plot maintained the root cultures transplanted from Africa and became a “source for cultural guerrilla resistance to the plantation system” (Wynter, 1971: p. 100) socially, politically, and environmentally.

Although plantation capitalism (racial capitalism) and its imaginaries in economics, literature and the arts have become significant influences for reinforcing euro-western ‘civilization,’ it should not be read as a totalizing narrative of the world (although it is paradigmatic in the rhetorical sense). Wynter, like many other anti-colonial thinkers, offers her analysis of the bewitched reality of the euro-western episteme to help us understand the development of the prevailing cultural imaginary of global capitalism and the linear structures that feature in many literary texts, but never says it’s the only cultural imaginary (although it’s played a massive role in contributing to climate change!) Just like Wynter argues for various genres of the human, she argues for the existence of other narratives of the world, other provision grounds on which worlds and cultures have been built and are sustained. Indeed, Wynter’s concept of ‘replantation’ describes both a cultural and ecological cultivation where different forms of imagination and relation flourished “…outside the machine of industrial plantation and its economic botany” (Yusoff, 2019). For example, King (2019) outlines how, in historical literature, the area of a plantation marked for indigo ⁶ processing was described as insect infected, with high potential for disease transmission, and uninhabitable for animals, “Yet like the hold of the ship, it also contained life that fostered alternative modes of survival, existence, and perhaps even pleasure” (p. 113). Extending on her research into the shoal as an ecotone, King follows Wynter and McKittrick to conceive of the indigo plantation as a “region of transition between distinct ecological, social, and ontological systems” (p. 113). The enslaved people working in this abject place on the plantation were often outside of the line of vision of the master, producing counter-epistemologies and other modes of resistance. This tradition is also shown in Hush Arbours, where enslaved people gathered in secret and performed ceremonies where they combined African spiritual traditions to Christian ones, outside of the master’s view – and are named for their ecological placement in the arbour, denoting a relationship to land.

This resistance of the order of the plantation has also been described by scholars through the practice and concept of marronage. The term marron derives from ‘cimarrones’ in Spanish which translates to ‘mountaineers’ and links the practice of marronage to the landscape itself. The political act of marronage now describes an ongoing refusal of euro-western culture and its histories of extraction. As Glissant (1990) states, “historical marronage intensified over time to exert a creative marronage” (1990, p. 71), or as Crawley explains, “marronage is the practice of intellectual possibility otherwise” (Crawley, 2020b: p. 20). These modes of living and working were a “…critical intervention into what would come to be normative relations to the ecological and the necessity of displacement, of settler colonial logics and logistics…” (Crawley, 2020a: p. 36). Across all these acts of creative resistance, it is significant to recognize how being otherwise is and continues to be inextricably linked to land and ecology: in the wilderness, in the provision grounds, in the swamp, in otherwise landscapes – and in the literature itself in which the landscape is also a “vivid character” (Glissant, 1990: p. 71). In short, resistance to the colonial order is grounded in ecology, land, and the environment.

Provision grounds, indigo processing places, hush arbors, and marronage occupy a figurative, actual, spiritual, and speculative spaces outside the plantation capitalism where traditional values can give a “focus of criticism against the impossible reality in which [the enslaved were] enmeshed” (Wynter, 1971: p. 100). These traditional values such as orality, song, folk stories (and their extensions in music/art etc.), built relations and thriving beyond the confines of the colonial order and literally and figuratively created different worlds. This co-relates with Wynter’s understanding of homo narrans or the narrated human; inspired by Aimé Césaire proposition of a scientific humanism that is poetic and of the word (mythos), Wynter’s homo narrans describes a humanity that is narrated or storied and always more than a what might be accounted for by reductionist and biocentric accounts. Instead, Wynter emphasizes that our species evolved alongside storytelling; it was through stories that we became/become who we are, narrating ourselves into being through the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, rehearsed over time. English as a subject discipline foregrounds the materiality and weight of stories and (master) narratives in creating an understanding of the workings of the world (Mishra Tarc, 2015; Singh, 2018; Snaza, 2019; Truman, 2019b). Although the prevailing cultural imaginary we inhabit in English literary education has been storied, re-storied, and reified throughout literary history and euro-western history, there are other stories happening, stories that break from this order: it is crucial to tell different stories and recognize that they have always been told and continue to be told outside the logics of the prevailing ‘civilization’ (white capitalist heteropatriarchy).

Other worlds are possible

Many of us (white) scholars were raised inside of and benefit consistently from the world order and colonial imaginaries that helped create the climate crisis. Many of us now also look to queer-feminist theorists of anti-colonialism for methods and methodologies on how to do things otherwise: how do we do that respectfully and by not (re)capturing these modes of thinking and feeling and doing into this ⁷ episteme? And how can we do that without extracting their ideas, essentializing experience, and capitalizing on pain (and overcoming)? Can we even? How do we reach outside of our inherited world order? This raises another aporia in discussing the relationship between English literary study’s cultural imaginaries and the climate crisis: the challenge of inherited context in speculative thought/imagination and how it’s mobilized in education and literature.

Plenty of scholars who have theorized speculative thought discuss how we cannot speculate from outside of our situated, or inherited context. Indeed, some feminist thinkers even arguing that we should not, in that we should always be ‘situated’ (Haraway, 1988). As an example, the utopian impulse of science fiction outlined by Jameson (2007) pushes writers (and readers) to imagine a world “radically different from this one” (p. xii): this utopian impulse arrives with the caveat that our “imaginations are hostages to our own mode of production” (p. xiii). Thus, Jameson argues that utopian thinking – while attempting to push beyond ‘known’ science or worlds – remains tethered to them, and accordingly, the main outcome of utopian thinking is to make us more “aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment…therefore the best utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively” (p. xiii). Otherwise possibility, according to Crawley (2020b) is not utopic, rather “it is the elaboration of the fact that alternatives exist (p. 29). Crawley, following Wynter, and Spillers outlines this otherwise possibility through Black joy and excess, vulnerability and openness, and an attention to the intermural and friendship: through building relations and practicing actions that go against the episteme of ‘Man’ (white, individual, liberal subject). Crawley (2020b) argues how the white-euro western order that stole Black people and desecrated Indigenous people and lands was an episteme that attempted to destroy “the capacity for imagination. But it did not succeed” (p. 31). Despite their attempted erasure during the construction of what we know as the western episteme and western ideologies, many people continued to develop their arts through worlding otherwise and cultivating a different imaginary for the world and themselves. For example, Indigenous author Ellen Van Neerven (2022) talks about ‘thrival’ (rather than just ‘survival’) of Indigenous populations over time that comes through in literature and arts, and Black studies scholar Katherine McKittrick (2021) discusses ‘Black livingness’ to describe how this operates in Black communities of thought beyond white (re)capture. In terms of curricular engagement in English literary studies, encouraging students to engage with texts authored by Caribbean diasporic authors that focus on Caribbean ecologies and relationship to land might enable an “an examination of both the limits of the White conquistador imagination and the possibilities created by Black imaginaries” (King, 2019: p. 124). Engagement with rich literary texts from the Caribbean as well as Indigenous climate fictions (Phillips et al., 2022) would give students an opportunity to begin to understand the co-implication of the breadth and depth of living and thinking worlds that operate within and outside of the established (plantation) order. ⁸

Anti-conclusion

We’re in a climate crisis, and it is a crisis of humanism, capitalism, and the coloniality of imagination. And climate fictions, or ‘cli-fi’ is proliferating and being taken up in schools and beyond now that (white) people have realized the world is in crisis (brought on in part by global capitalism and its ideologies). However, many anti-colonial and Indigenous authors around the world and authors of the Caribbean diaspora have been writing about the relationship between extraction, capitalism, and climate for a long time, using both established literary techniques and unsettling established literary techniques. As Wynter, (1971) argues, the novel (and other literatures) is imbricated in both the cause and effects of the capitalism that generated the global (climate) crises we’re in. But stories are many, and so also offer critiques of, and potential/actual modes of existence beyond this world order.

In this section I will briefly discuss Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man (Chamoiseau, 2018) as an anti-quintessential novella that unsettles the colonial imaginary and engages with ecology and land as more than a backdrop or setting. I call it anti-quintessential because although I do not want to reduce the text to suit a curricular aim it is a fantastic work of literature that activates the novel form as a ‘question mark’ through both using and breaking canonical forms. It offers a distinct mode of entry into thinking about how plantation capitalism has shaped human experience in the Caribbean including language, the geographies beyond it, and the world order that generated anthropogenic climate disasters.

Slave Old Man describes the story of an escaped slave as he disappears into the forest in colonial Martinique and is pursued by a hellish dog and plantation master. As the man travels deeper into the forest, he (and his pursuers) is transformed as the history and futures of slavery dissolve into ecological imagery that invokes a visceral understanding of deep time, and a different reality. Originally published in French and Creole in 1997, Linda Cloverdale’s 2018 sublime English translation (which won the Best Translated Book Award in the US) makes this text available to English readers while keeping many Créole words in-text.

The novella’s setting, plot, and characters provide a literary description of the horrors and aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade and plantation capitalism, “the grandiose in-humanity that exploits human beings as an inert, indescribable destiny” (p. 7). The narrative also offers an sense of the freedom attained by the Old Man after he finally flees the sugar plantation. “The docile among the docile – has gone marooning” (p. 13) is announced near the end of the first chapter and as the Old Man is pursued by the master and his dog. As described above, marooning as a term referred to escaped enslaved people who then lived in the mountains; the term now is used to describe a poesis of living outside of colonial orders – an experience the Old Man has once in the forest.

Read as a whole, including translator’s introduction, Afterward, glossary of Créole terms and epitaphs, the novella provides the reader with a glimpse of an otherwise world flourishing through creolization of culture and language: “A history greatly furrowed by variant stories, in songs in the Créole tongue, wordplay in the French tongue” (p. 3). The chapters or ‘cadences’ of the book (Matter, Alive, Waters, Lunar, Solar, The Stone, Bones) reference nature and ecology in relation with the Old Man. Each ‘cadence’ begins with an epigraph or by Édouard Glissant, renowned Martinican author, activist, and theorist that informed the Créolité literary movement that Slave Old Man author’s Chamioseau is also a key figure in. The Créolité tradition foregrounds the co-imbrication of life and art with ecology, celebrates diversity, and foregrounds oral storytelling (Glissant and Chamoiseau, 2022). The paratextual inclusion is significant in that it maintains a dialogue with Glissant throughout the text and provides both poetic and practical supplementation to the novella. In addition to Glissant’s epigraph, each chapter also includes an anonymous epitaph that references bones, creativity, and the earth; this thematic hints toward the novella’s climax and reinforces the Créolité literary forms as rooted in a specific ecology and geography.

In the context of literature and literary study that seeks to subvert the colonial novel as both narrative and form, Slave Old Man is exemplar in activating language as the story (rather than the plot being the story of the novel). Chamioseau’s word use, imagery, and unsettling of ‘proper’ punctuation, syntax and Creole-French-English lexicon allure, inspire, and disorient the reader as they propel both the Old Man and the reader into a different imaginary. Chamioseau takes a familiar literary genre and makes it unfamiliar in a variety of ways including switching from third person narration to first mid-paragraph in the middle of the book in a dizzying sequence where the world is “born without any veil of modesty” (p. 66). An otherwise world of thick and more-than-human intimacies is revealed as the Old Man journeys (magically, unrealistically/realistically) further into the heart of the Great Woods.

Unpacking the literary moves and imagery of Slave Old Man would take an entire paper or book, but I offer this brief engagement with it as a wonderful text to exemplify the power of a piece of writing in subverting the novel form and colonial order that are co-implicated in climate change and euro-western humanism.

In conclusion, there’re all sorts of significant literatures all around the world, and students should read regionally and specifically about where they are, because the climate crisis is local as well as global. But if we want literature students and teachers to understand some of the foundational historical causes of the current global climate crisis as put forth by many anti-colonial scholars of literature and poets, we need to expand our reading repertories.

*Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and critiques, and to David Ben Shannon for reading and shredding like a trusted friend) a re-draft of this paper.