Decolonizing posthumanist geographies

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2014, Pages 33-47

  Sundberg, Juanita ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

decolonizing; Eurocentrism; Indigenous geographies; ontology; posthumanism

Indexed keywords

COLONIALISM; DECOLONIZATION; GEOGRAPHICAL THEORY; HUMAN GEOGRAPHY; INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE; THEORETICAL STUDY;

EID: 84891522686     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474013486067     Document Type: Article

References (164)

1. As noted below, I use the term posthumanism to signal a diverse body of work by authors who may or may not identify with the label. On the relationship between dualist constructions of nature and culture and colonialism, see Val Plumwood, Feminism & the Mastery of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1993).
2. B. Willems-Braun, 'Buried Epistemologies: The Politics of Nature in (Post) colonial British Columbia', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87, 1997, pp. 3-31.
3. For reviews of recent work, see: R. Panelli, 'More-than-Human Social Geographies: Posthuman and Other Possibilities', Progress in Human Geography, 34, 2010, pp. 79-87.
4. In addition, see R-C. Collard, 'Cougar-Human Entanglements and the Biopolitical Un-Making of Safe Space', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30, 2012, pp. 23-42.
5. R-C. Collard, 'Cougar Figures, Gender, and the Performances of Predation', Gender, Place & Culture, 19, 2012, pp. 518-40.
6. J. Dempsey, 'Tracking Grizzly Bears in British Columbia's Environmental Politics', Environment and Planning A, 42, 2010, pp. 1138-56.
7. S. Hinchliffe, M. Kearnes, M. Degen and S. Whatmore, 'Urban Wild Things: A Cosmopolitical Experiment', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23, 2005, pp. 643-58.
8. K. Hobson, 'Political Animals? On Animals as Subjects in an Enlarged Political Geography', Political Geography, 26, 2007, pp. 250-67.
9. S. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2002).
10. A. Watson and O.H. Huntington, 'They're Here-I Can Feel Them: The Epistemic Spaces of Indigenous and Western Knowledges', Social and Cultural Geography, 9, 2008, pp. 257-81.
11. B. Latour, The Politics of Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
12. Panelli, 'More-than-Human Social Geographies'.
13. Watson and Huntington, 'They're Here-I Can Feel Them', p. 258.
14. The term posthumanism is used in a number of other ways; for details, see C. Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
15. B. Braun, 'Modalities of Posthumanism', Environment and Planning A, 36, 2004, pp. 1352-5.
16. N. Castree and C. Nash, 'Posthuman Geographies', Social & Cultural Geography, 7(4), 2006, pp. 501-4.
17. K. Anderson, Race and the Crisis of Humanism (New York: Routledge, 2007).
18. K. Barad, 'Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 2003, pp. 801-31.
19. D. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
20. B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
21. J.M. Blaut, The Colonizers Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: The Guilford Press, 1993).
22. E. Dussel, 'Eurocentrism and Modernity', in J. Beverley, M. Aronna and J. Oviedo (eds), The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 65-76.
23. I agree with Lawrence Berg that the term 'white supremacist' is more accurate to describe 'present conditions in white settler societies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA as well as former European imperial powers like Germany, the UK, and Spain', L. Berg, 'Geographies of Identity I: Geography-(Neo)liberalism-White Supremacy', Progress in Human Geography, 36, 2012, pp. 508-17.
24. Berg is drawing on bell hooks as well as The Companion to African-American Philosophy.
25. W.S. Shaw, R.D.K. Herman and G.R. Dobbs, 'Encountering Indigeneity: Re-Imagining and Decolonizing Geography', Geografiska Annaler, 88(3), 2006, pp. 267-76 (268).
26. See also J.T. Johnson, G. Cant, R. Howitt and E. Peters, 'Creating Anti-colonial Geographies: Embracing Indigenous Peoples' Knowledges and Rights', Geographical Research, 45, 2007, pp. 117-20.
27. Watson and Huntington, 'They're Here-I Can Feel Them'.
28. L.T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books, 1999).
29. M. Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
30. R. Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007).
31. R. Pualani Louis, 'Can You Hear Us Now? Voices from the Margin: Using Indigenous Methodologies in Geographic Research', Geographical Research, 45, 2007, pp. 130-9.
32. Shaw et al., 'Encountering Indigeneity', p. 273.
33. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies.
34. W. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
35. Wolfe posed this question in relation to posthumanism.
36. Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, p. xvi.
37. Shaw et al., 'Encountering Indigeneity', p. 270.
38. S.C. Larsen and J.T. Johnson, 'In Between Worlds: Place, Experience, and Research in Indigenous Geography', Journal of Cultural Geography, 29, 2012, pp. 1-13.
39. Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, p. 57. Kuokkanen draws on Foucault in her understanding of episteme to mean 'a lens through which we perceive the world; we use it to structure the statements that count as knowledge in a particular period.'
40. The notion of a 'pluriversal world' is advanced in the modernity-coloniality framework.
41. See R. Grosfoguel, 'Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality: Decolonizing Political Economy and Postcolonial Studies', Eurozine, 2008, available at .
42. A. Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
43. M. Blaser, Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco & Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
44. M. Blaser, 'The Threat of the Yrmo: The Political Ontology of a Sustainable Hunting Program', American Anthropologist, 111, 2009, pp. 10-20. The term was put forward earlier in G. Esteva and M.S. Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures (New York: Zed Books, 1998).
45. G. Esteva and M.S. Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures (New York: Zed Books, 1998).
46. Zapatista Army of National Liberation, 'Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle', 1996, .
47. T. Olesen, 'Globalising the Zapatistas: From Third World Solidarity to Global Solidarity?', Third World Quarterly, 25, 2004, pp. 255-67.
48. J. Sundberg, 'Diabolic Caminos in the Desert & Cat Fights on the Río: A Post-Humanist Political Ecology of Boundary Enforcement in the United States-Mexico Borderlands', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101, 2011, pp. 318-36, p. 321.
49. D. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p. 4.
50. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies.
51. Hinchliffe et al., 'Urban Wild Things'.
52. N. Castree, 'Environmental Issues: Relational Ontologies and Hybrid Politics', Progress in Human Geography, 27, 2003, pp. 203-11.
53. D.P. Dixon and J.P. Jones, 'My Dinner with Derrida, or Spatial Analysis and Poststructuralism Do Lunch', Environment and Planning A, 30, 1998, pp. 247-60.
54. Panelli, 'Social Geographies: Encounters with Indigenous and More-than-White-Anglo Geographies', Progress in Human Geography, 32, 2008, pp. 801-11.
55. Larsen and Johnson, 'In Between Worlds'; special issue of Geographical Research, 45, 2007.
56. 'Indigenous Peoples' Knowledges and Rights'; special issue of Geografiska Annaler B, 88, 2006.
57. Panelli, 'More-than-Human Social Geographies'.
58. Watson and Huntington, 'They're Here-I Can Feel Them'.
59. J.T. Johnson and B. Murton, 'Re-Placing Native Science: Indigenous Voices in Contemporary Constructions of Nature', Geographical Research, 45, 2007, pp. 121-9.
60. See also Plumwood, Feminism & the Mastery of Nature.
61. Shaw et al., 'Encountering Indigeneity'.
62. F. Apffel-Marglin (ed.), The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development (New York: Zed Books, 1998).
63. G. Cajete, A People's Ecology: Explorations in Sustainable Living (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 1999).
64. G. Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 2000).
65. P. Cole, 'An Academic Take on "Indigenous Traditions & Ecology"', Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 3, 1998, pp. 100-15.
66. V. Deloria Jr, God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003 [1973]).
67. D.W. Gegeo and K.A. Watson-Gegeo '"How We Know": Kwara'ae Rural Villagers Doing Indigenous Epistemology', The Contemporary Pacific, 13, 2001, pp. 55-88.
68. L. Little Bear, 'Jagged Worldviews Colliding', in M. Battiste (ed.), Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000), pp. 77-85.
69. R.M. Roberts and P.R. Wills, 'Understanding Maori Epistemology: A Scientific Perspective', in H. Wautischer (ed.), Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology (Brookfield: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 43-77
70. Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University. Cajete argues that such work should not be viewed as exemplifying a coherent, ahistorical and placeless cosmology, but rather as situated stories of 'complex human relationships in complex interaction with nature'.
71. Cajete, Native Science, p. 82.
72. Barad, 'Posthumanist Performativity'.
73. Blaser, Storytelling Globalization.
74. J. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York: Routledge, 1993).
75. D. Turnbull, 'Maps, Narratives and Trails: Performativity, Hodology and Distributed Knowledges in Complex Adaptive Systems-An Approach to Emergent Mapping', Geographical Research, 45, 2007, pp. 140-9, p. 147.
76. W. Mignolo, 'Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom', Theory, Culture & Society, 26, 2009, pp. 159-81.
77. W. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
78. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies.
79. Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies.
80. Larsen and Johnson, 'In Between Worlds'.
81. Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, p. xiv.
82. Johnson and Murton, 'Re-Placing Native Science'.
83. Plumwood, Feminism & the Mastery of Nature.
84. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance.
85. For some exceptions, see work mentioned in Panelli, 'More-than-Human Social Geographies'.
86. Larsen and Johnson, 'In Between Worlds'.
87. Sundberg, 'Diabolic Caminos in the Desert'.
88. The term 'more-than-human' is drawn from Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies.
89. B. Braun and S.J. Whatmore (eds), Political Matter. Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
90. Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter, p. xx.
91. Johnson and Murton, 'Re-Placing Native Science'.
92. Panelli, 'More-than-Human Social Geographies'.
93. R. Howitt and S. Jackson, 'Some Things Do Change: Indigenous Rights, Geographers and Geography in Australia', The Australian Geographer, 29, 1998, pp. 155-73.
94. Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, p. 6.
95. Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter, p. x.
96. Zapatista Army of National Liberation, 'Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle', 1996, .
97. Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter, p. xiv.
98. The same may be said about Isabelle Stengers' contribution, which is based on the premise that 'we may have to face the eventual demands of beings that were comfortably put away as creatures of human imagination,' such as goddesses, dijinns, and spirits. In calling forth a 'we' who do not believe in goddesses, the chapter implicitly alludes to a 'them' who do.
99. I. Stengers, 'Including Nonhumans in Political Theory: Opening Pandora's Box', in Braun and Whatmore (eds), Political Matter, p. 4.
100. Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter, p. xiv.
101. J. Bennett, 'The Naive Ambition of Vital Materialism', in Braun and Whatmore (eds), Political Matter, p. 36. Emphasis in original.
102. Bennett, 'The Naive Ambition of Vital Materialism', p. 52.
103. Bennett, 'The Naive Ambition of Vital Materialism', p. 49.
104. Bennett, 'The Naive Ambition of Vital Materialism', p. 53.
105. B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
106. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 99.
107. D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
108. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 6.
109. Blaser, 'The Threat of the Yrmo'.
110. Blaser, 'The Threat of the Yrmo', p. 15.
111. Blaser, 'The Threat of the Yrmo', p. 16.
112. See R. Grosfoguel, 'Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality: Decolonizing Political Economy and Postcolonial Studies', Eurozine, 2008, available at .
113. M. Blaser, 'Ontology and Indigeneity: On the Political Ontology of Heterogenous Assemblages', cultural geographies, 2012, p. 7, doi: 10.1177/1474474012462534.
114. A. Khasnabish, 'Anarch@-Zapatismo: Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Power, and the Insurgent Imagination', Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action, 5, 2011, pp. 70-95, p. 71.
115. T. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000).
116. D. Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2003).
117. Turnbull, 'Maps, Narratives and Trails', p. 142.
118. Turnbull, 'Maps, Narratives and Trails'.
119. Turnbull, 'Maps, Narratives and Trails'.
120. See for instance, K. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).
121. My thoughts on decolonizing were significantly influenced and enriched by comments made during the key note presentation and subsequent panel discussion of the Decolonizing Cascadia? Rethinking Critical Geographies 7th Annual Regional Mini-Conference, University of British Columbia, November 2012.
122. Thanks to Sarah de Leuux, Margo Greenwood, Glen Coulthard, Sarah Hunt, and Harsha Walia.
123. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places.
124. Blaser, Storytelling Globalization.
125. Subcomandate Insurgente Marcos, 'Opening Remarks at the First Intercontinental Encuentro For Humanity and Against Neoliberalism', in J. Ponce de León (ed.), Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), p. 103.
126. J. Holloway and E. Peláez (eds), Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p. 164.
127. G. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990).
128. See also K. Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
129. P. Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), p. 11.
130. K. Heikkilä and G. Fondahl, 'Co-Managed Research: Non-Indigenous Thoughts on an Indigenous Toponymy Project in Northern British Columbia', Journal of Cultural Geography, 29, 2012, pp. 61-86.
131. B. Lawrence and E. Dua, 'Decolonizing Antiracism', Social Justice, 32, 2005, pp. 120-43
132. N. Sharma and C. Wright, 'Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States', Social Justice, 35, 2008, pp. 120-38.
133. N. Maldonado-Torres, 'On the Coloniality of Being', Cultural Studies, 21, 2007, pp. 240-70, p. 243.
134. W. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)
135. A. Quijano, 'Coloniality of Power, Knowledge, and Latin America', Nepantla: Views from South, 1, 2000, pp. 533-80.
136. Howitt and Jackson, 'Some Things Do Change'.
137. C. Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Change (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 1996), p. 194.
138. Willems-Braun, 'Buried Epistemologies'.
139. A. Lehtinen, 'Politics of Decoupling: Breaks between Indigenous and Imported Senses of the Nordic North', Journal of Cultural Geography, 29, 2012, pp. 105-23.
140. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies.
141. J. Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
142. Larsen and Johnson, 'In Between Worlds', p. 5.
143. See also J. Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).
144. Zapatistas, Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona, 2005, .
145. Zapatistas, Sixth Declaration.
146. Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, p. 117.
147. Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, p. 118.
148. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies. With few exceptions, geographical research with a focus on Indigenous people tends to frame them as objects of research and, according to Hodge and Lester, uses a colonial and researcher-centric model in its 'conceptualization, development, structure and boundaries' and is characterized by the 'exclusion of an Indigenous conceptual method of explanation'.
149. P. Hodge and J. Lester, 'Indigenous Research: Whose Priority? Journeys and Possibilities of Cross Cultural Research in Geography', Geographical Research, 44, 2006, pp. 41-51 pp. 44, 46.
150. Johnson et al., 'Creating Anti-colonial Geographies', p. 199. In a frank and insightful paper, Heikkilä and Fondahl present the unexpected challenges that arose throughout a co-managed research project with band council and community members to document toponymic information on First Nation land, which would then be used to develop an outdoor science camp curriculum for the Nation's youth.
151. Heikkilä and Fondahl, 'Co-Managed Research'.
152. See also Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies.
153. Watson and Huntington, 'They're Here-I Can Feel Them'.
154. Watson and Huntington, 'They're Here-I Can Feel Them', p. 258.
155. Watson and Huntington, 'They're Here-I Can Feel Them', p. 257.
156. Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, p. 155.
157. In Unsettling the Settler Within, Regan suggests settlers study Indigenous counter-narratives of law, diplomacy, and peacemaking (p. 14).
158. K. Lloyd, S. Wright, S. Suchet-Pearson, L. Burarrwanga and Bawaka Country, 'Reframing Development through Collaboration: Towards a Relational Ontology of Connection in Bawaka, North East Arnhem Land', Third World Quarterly, 33, 2012, pp. 1075-94, p. 1087.
159. Hodge and Lester, 'Indigenous Research'.
160. S. D. Leeuw, E.S. Cameron and M.L. Greenwood, 'Participatory and Community-Based Research, Indigenous Geographies, and the Spaces of Friendship: A Critical Engagement', The Canadian Geographer-Le Géographe canadien, 56, 2012, pp. 180-94.
161. Idle No More, Mission and Plan of Action, .
162. Idle No More, < http://www.idlenomore1.blogspot.ca/2012/12/first-nations-to-hold-nationwide.html>.
163. The movement was sparked by legislation put forward by the Harper government that will unilaterally-without consultation and consent-alter sections of the Indian Act and disregard treaties signed with First Nations. In addition, Omnibus Bill C-45 will affect the Canadian Environmental Protection Act and the Navigable Water Protection Act and, therefore, will potentially affect all inhabitants of the nation-state.
164. Lloyd et al., 'Reframing Development through Collaboration', p. 1088.