Book Review: Decolonial Ecology

Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, by Malcolm Ferdinand, (2022 English, 2019 French). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Malcolm Ferdinand’s new text in political ecology offers both a processual, meta-historical analysis of slavery as a mode of production in Western modernity and a visionary political framework for a decolonizing version of environmentalism. Written in a visceral, post-colonial literary style, Decolonial Ecology engages readers emotionally and intellectually, urging them to connect environmentalism with anti-racist social-justice efforts. It challenges us to consider how an intersectional we—comprising unequal, politicized, and situated humans and non-humans—might co-exist more justly in an increasingly precarious world.

The central argument in the prologue asserts that the ecological crisis began in 1492 and stems from modernity’s subsequent “double fracture”—the colonial and environmental divides expressed in Othering dualisms, such as colonizers versus the colonized, nature versus culture, and human versus non-human. Ferdinand frames this ecological crisis as fundamentally one of justice, proposing that historically divided anti-racist and environmentalist movements unite through his concept of “decolonial ecology.”

Divided into four main sections with 17 sub-chapters, the book begins each section with an image of a slave-ship and a textual description of its “contents.” The first section traces a historical and ecological narrative of colonization and slavery in the Caribbean, connecting it to contemporary events—such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005—to analyze how the universalizing tendencies found in Anthropocene discourse produce forms of exclusion. Here, Ferdinand introduces the meta concept of “colonial inhabitation” (26) and describes the long-standing ecological crisis as a “colonial hurricane” (67). He expands this line of analysis by linking the multi-scalar ruptures of the Plantationocene (Chapter 2) with his theorization of the “Negrocene” (Chapter 3)—a “non-racializing approach to slavery” (60), in which all people in the “hold of the modern world” are considered “Negro” (61).

Section two offers three case studies of “colonial inhabitation”: in Haiti, Martinique and Guadeloupe, and Vieques, Puerto Rico. The ongoing violence in these contemporary examples of conservation-led dispossession, landscape toxicity, and neo-colonial military occupation, respectively, offers familiar ground for anthropologists. Ferdinand details how the longue durée of “slow violence” (109) constrains local options for moving forward (e.g., sustainability transitions) in these “colonial heterotopias” (103) and argues that technocentric ecology trends reinforce colonial “fractures.” For example, the accumulation of pesticides in the French overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe has made local fishing illegal and tuber crops unsafe to eat (111). Yet, in a grim irony, the contamination spares the export crop of bananas—thus reinforcing the islands’ historical core-periphery economic dependency, whereby local resources are sacrificed for global export markets. Ferdinand concludes this section with a historical analysis showing that the preservation of the plantation system was a key condition for the abolition of slavery.

The third section explores resistance through Maroon practices, which Ferdinand interprets as “ecological praxis,” and draws out the lesser-known anti-colonial and -slavery themes within Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s and Henry David Thoreau’s writings on naturalism and personal experience. This analysis points again to what Ferdinand calls a “decolonial ecology.” Central to healing modernity’s “double fracture” is the need to embrace subaltern, decolonial, and ecofeminist movements. These movements, as Ferdinand explains, extend our thinking beyond heterotopias and the politics of resource redistribution (177-8).

Ferdinand’s “worldly-ecology” proposal—where racial emancipation and social justice are enacted concurrently with “interspecies alliances” and environmental action—is more fully developed in the fourth section. The ongoing nature of racialized violence and exploitative multispecies relations leads Ferdinand to propose a plurality-centered “cosmopolitics of relation” (233). This approach envisions an encounter-driven horizon that moves beyond identity politics and “community affiliations.” Combining both a political space (as companions of a single world) and a political composition (a world inclusive of non-humans), justice in this context becomes a “cosmopolitan” demand that transcends the existing calls for reparations sought through juridical frameworks (234-8).

Cosmopolitical Worldly-Ecology and Ship-Mate Allies
Expansive academic references alongside colonial-era sources, contemporary media, and social movement histories make this book invaluable to scholars of Caribbean studies, environmental governance, social movements, and post-humanism. Ethnographic cases primarily focus on the French Caribbean, Ferdinand’s place of origin—though I hesitate to use that term, given his compelling argument on how the “deterritorialization there is structural” (138). In this comprehensive and timely account, Ferdinand thoroughly examines the challenges of “healing” the many “ruptures” caused by colonialization—whether in relation to the body, land, or politics —even as he also addresses the full scope of the work involved in decolonization.

Ferdinand’s skillful placing of Arturo Escobar’s decolonial political ecology into conversation with Édouard Glissant’s concept of creolization, Homi Bhabha’s hybridization, and queer theory (Chapter 17)—thus forming a “creolized gestalt ontology” (232)—will particularly appeal to decolonial scholars, social-movement activists, and more-than-human theorists alike. Unfortunately, such exciting synergies towards the end are less developed than those in the first half of the book. Decolonial Ecology’s impressively ambitious breadth is also the primary challenge that it presents to readers. While innovative neologisms no doubt ignite interdisciplinary thought, underexplored academic references assume a reader’s deep knowledge of a range of academic fields. We are, however, left in no doubt that his concept of the “Negrocene” offers a more accurate framework for understanding our current socio-ecological predicament(s) than over-population narratives (Chapter 5) or the warnings of Anthropocene “collapsologists” (10). English-language readers should also note the three-year translation time-lag as well as the endnotes explaining the book’s many French-language wordplays.

The centralization of the labor and struggles of enslaved and marginalized persons (58) in the Negrocene—and Ferdinand’s expanded view of labor and agency (cf. “sympraxis”; see page 226) to be inclusive of non-humans (Chapter 16)—will be of particular interest to scholars in the anthropology of work. Yet the text’s focus on modernity elides discussion of the specific dynamics and variants of capitalism, notwithstanding political ecology’s grounding in eco-Marxist thought and the author’s assertions regarding the “slave-making constitution of modernity” (238). I was nonetheless struck by the book’s overlap with scholarship on environmentality and governmentality (see Argyrou, Agrawal, Li, and others)—as well as its many constructive provocations, such as a call to deconstruct the concept of biodiversity (80), which Ferdinand articulates as homogenizing.

Descriptions of numerous “figures” (avenger, savior, kamikaze, and others) throughout Decolonial Ecology insightfully details generations of counter- and hegemonic discourses found in colonial and post-colonial social and environmental movements. Further discussion of specific Caribbean social movements may have better supported Ferdinand’s aim to foreground the Caribbean in his analysis, as per the book’s title. Anthropologists may also stall here at the romanticist and ahistoricizing statements about “ancient” and “indigenous cosmologies,” which contradict his overall argument about the colonial creation—and “off-worlding”—of Others, as well as his critique of Philippe Descola’s idea of a “plurality of worlds” (234).

Overall, the extension of agency to, and allyship with, non-humans and the on-boarding (to continue his ship metaphors) of white people will significantly appeal to social-movement theorists seeking to reconcile marginalized peoples and “masters” (108) in the pursuit of shared political objectives. Ferdinand’s reframing of reparation demands as cosmopolitan is, for me, a revitalizing contribution to decolonial theory and the social movements drawing inspiration from this body of thought. Simultaneously, Decolonial Ecology does not shy away from the horrors of slavery and colonialism’s recursive creation of unlivable socio-ecological inequalities and fragilities. Given that cross-disciplinary multi-species ethnographies have only recently become more grounded in political economy and global history, anthropologists should undoubtedly make space for Ferdinand’s “world-ship” (Chapter 14) so that we can face together “the tempest” as “ship-mates” (200). As we learn here, the global majority have been ecologically grieving for 500 years, and it is high time that Western environmentalists recognize this fact.

References

Agrawal, Arun (2005) Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Argyrou, Vassos (2005) The Logic of Environmentalism: Anthropology, Ecology and Postcoloniality. New York: Berghahn.

Li, Tania (2007) The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Author Biography

Sharan Kaur is an economic anthropologist working at the intersections of human geography and critical development studies. Following a commercial agroecology and food sovereignty career, Kaur is exploring as part of her Ph.D. studies the dilemmas of food production and biodiversity in Guyanese rice production.