Postcolonial Fictions of the Anthropocene: Tracing Nonhuman Agency in Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing

Abstract

This chapter investigates notions of the nonhuman in the light of the Anthropocene, arguing that both concepts of anthropogenic climate change and concepts of the nonhuman are still firmly rooted in traditional binary Western discourses. With the emergence of new theoretical approaches that circumvent binary logics of thinking (e.g. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002; Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007; Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, Braidotti, The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013), however, novel ways of imagining human-nonhuman relationships open up. Taking as its starting point Shubhangi Swarup’s novel Latitudes of Longing (2020), this chapter considers how literatures from the Global South contribute to envisioning the de-centralisation of the human and how they help provide new approaches to imaging the nonhuman. Swarup’s novel questions traditional dichotomies and hierarchical doctrines of power. Ironically challenging notions of science, (post)coloniality, and ‘nature,’ the novel ties in Western and non-Western knowledges to envision human fates as tightly interwoven with the nonhuman world, while in turn showing the nonhuman as in no way dependent on the human. Presenting nonhuman agency as largely independent of human social, cultural, and scientific norms, the novel imagines nonhuman geological and environmental forces as active, changing, and wonderfully diverse.