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The Language of the Dusk: Anthropocentrism, Time, and Decoloniality in the Work of Ursula K. Le Guin

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The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture ((PSSPC))

Abstract

In this chapter we trace Le Guin’s struggles against the time-destroying forces of colonization and eco-devastation, and track her interest in the possibilities of nonhuman time. We emphasize her debt to the scientific and temporal literacies of indigenous peoples while interrogating her placement of indigenous lifeways in a supposedly lost past. We argue that it is only by situating indigenous knowledge of the temporality of the nonhuman in the ongoing present that the narrative of progressive, linear time driving colonial extraction can be combated. Rereading Le Guin’s early work in the light of her later inventions, we put her commitment to nonlinear temporalities into practice and excavate the many glimpses of a more utopian, non-anthropocentric relation to time which lies buried and waiting in her oeuvre.

I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind

Ursula K. Le Guin

Usà puyew usu wapiw!

Cree saying

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Notes

  1. 1.

    On racism in SF publishing see (Delany 2000; Flood 2016). For scholarship on SF produced by people of color see (Dillon 2012b; Womack 2013; Banerjee and Fritzsche 2018).

  2. 2.

    Notable exceptions include (Helford 1997; Dillon 2017b and Spicer 2021).

  3. 3.

    For a discussion of Always Coming Home’s appropriation of indigenous knowledge see Helford (1997, p. 79).

  4. 4.

    Earthsea’s dominant, wizardry-using, and Hardic-speaking human civilization.

  5. 5.

    See also Attebery’s discussion of Tehanu (2021), and Le Guin (1993a).

  6. 6.

    See also Tehanu, wherein women’s knowledge is offered up as an alternative to the androcentric archive of wizardry, and Earthsea Revisioned where Le Guin contrasts the transactional and sacrificial logic of traditional masculinity with the forms of wisdom and freedom held by Auntie Moss, Tenar, and (eventually) Ged in Tehanu.

  7. 7.

    This critique is foreshadowed in Tehanu by the story of the Woman of Kemay.

  8. 8.

    See also Earthsea Revisioned, where Le Guin describes dragons as “a way of knowing” and a principle of revolution and change (1993a, pp. 21–24).

  9. 9.

    See also Isabelle Stengers (2021), where she discusses how Cob and those like him desire a “world where everything is possible and with the atemporal and abstract idea of the omnipotence of spirit,” that is not the ultimate reality of Earthsea, as instead it is the “joy of creation, of fashioning” that undergirds human participation in the world.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of London, London, UK

    Katie Stone, Eli Lee & Francis Gene-Rowe

Authors
  1. Katie Stone
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  2. Eli Lee
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  3. Francis Gene-Rowe
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Correspondence to Katie Stone .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France

    Christopher L. Robinson

  2. École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France

    Sarah Bouttier

  3. New Sorbonne University, Paris, France

    Pierre-Louis Patoine

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Stone, K., Lee, E., Gene-Rowe, F. (2021). The Language of the Dusk: Anthropocentrism, Time, and Decoloniality in the Work of Ursula K. Le Guin. In: Robinson, C.L., Bouttier, S., Patoine, PL. (eds) The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82827-1_6

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