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.
By:
Malcom Ferdinand
Foreword by:
Angela Y. Davis
Translated by:
Anthony Paul Smith
Imprint: Polity Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 218mm,
Width: 145mm,
Spine: 31mm
Weight: 544g
ISBN: 9781509546220
ISBN 10: 1509546227
Series: Critical South
Pages: 300
Publication Date: 26 November 2021
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of Illustrations Index of Ships Acknowledgements Foreword – Angela Davis Prologue Part 1: The Modern Tempest: Environmental Violence and Colonial Ruptures Chapter 1: Colonial Inhabitation: An Earth without a World Chapter 2: The Matricides of the Plantationocene Chapter 3: The Hold and the Negrocene Chapter 4: The Colonial Hurricane Part 2: Noah’s Ark: When Environmentalism Refuses the World Chapter 5: Noah’s Ark: Boarding, or the abandonment of the world Chapter 6: Reforesting without the World (Haiti) Chapter 7: Paradise or Hell in the Nature Preserves (Puerto Rico) Chapter 8: The Masters’ Chemistry (Martinique and Guadeloupe) Chapter 9: A Colonial Ecology: At the Heart of the Double Fracture Part 3: The Slave Ship: Rising Up from Modernity’s Hold in Search of a World Chapter 10: The Slave Ship: Debarking Off-World Chapter 11: Maroon Ecology: Fleeing the Plantationocene Chapter 12: Rousseau, Thoreau, and Civil Marronage Chapter 13: A Decolonial Ecology: Rising up from the hold Part 4: A World-Ship: World-Making Beyond the Double Fracture Chapter 14: A World-Ship: Politics of encounter Chapter 15: Forming a Body in the World: Reconnecting with a Mother-Earth Chapter 16: Interspecies Alliances: The Animal Cause and The Negro Cause Chapter 17: A Worldly-Ecology: On the Bridge of Justice Epilogue World-Making The Intrusion of Ayiti Recovering the Sun of Africa Notes
Malcom Ferdinand is a researcher in political ecology and environmental humanities at the CNRS and Université Paris Dauphine-PSL.
Reviews for Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World
"“Malcom Ferdinand brilliantly breaks away from the spider web of canonical ecological narratives and arguments. The wrongdoing of modernity is diagnosed from the decolonial Caribbean experience of coloniality. Decolonial Ecology reveals – through the power of storytelling – that the sacralization of reason, statistics, and mega-data has prevented us from realizing that ecological and colonial problems cannot be solved within the blindness of the Western modernity that created the problems.” Walter D. Mignolo, author of The Politics of Decolonial Investigations “The book is a provocation to those thinkers who stress the importance of thinking about the environment through the perspective of geological time, which is a temporal horizon that considers the details of events like colonialism to be insignificant on a planetary scale. Ferdinand’s work is a vehement rejection of that move, an insistence that any thought about modernity’s ‘crisis’ must start with the racist and ecocidal violence of colonialism that created it.” Environmental Politics ""Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology contributes to a rich history of anti-colonial Afro-Caribbean philosophy, cements Caribbean values within the global environmental justice movement, and speaks to the struggles of marginalised people around the world as they attempt to shape a world that includes their own visions for the future."" Environmental Values"
