Organized by Penelope Anthias, Joel E. Correia, and Kiran Asher

This Symposium takes on questions of how actually existing movements contest various forms of “colonial Natures,” from settler property regimes to extractive frontiers and conservation landscapes. The authors of the six articles highlight the situated praxis of grassroots communities and organic intellectuals in Bolivia, India, Iran, Paraguay, Tanzania, and the United States, and show how they resist, reshape, and strategically engage colonial and capitalist logics of nature in defense of their own ontologies and life projects. Contributors emphasize how decolonizing struggles are contingent, ongoing, and full of compromise, conflict, and “making do.” Informed by the communities they are in conversation with, the organizers of this collection and the authors of the articles build on diverse and entangled genealogies of anti-colonial and postcolonial thought to further debates and actions to decolonize Nature, territory, land, and politics. Together they hold material and epistemic approaches to anti-colonial thought in productive tension and mobilize feminist and other critical methodologies to parse the ambivalences of representation, responsibility, and the ethics of locating ourselves as scholars and allies in anti- and de-colonial debates and in the political economy of knowledge production. In doing so, they critically question key terms (Nature, gender, land, indigeneity, territory, property, decolonization, and more) of knowledge production, politics, and contestation.

Querying Nature and (Anti-/De-)coloniality: Introduction to the Symposium by Penelope Anthias, Joel E. Correia, and Kiran Asher

Bending Possession: How Detroiters Care for Land by Remediating Settler Property by Nicholas L. Caverly

When Broken Worlds Churn: The Anti-Caste Fabulations of Du Saraswathi by Shreyas Sreenath

Indigenous Natures and the Anthropocene: Racial Capitalism, Violent Materialities, and the Colonial Politics of Representation by Penelope Anthias and Kiran Asher

Iran as Subaltern Empire: Lake Orumiyeh, Environmental Injustice, and Coloniality in Iranian Azerbaijan by A. Marie Ranjbar

From Colonial Natures to Entangled Ecologies: Making Due and Relational Geographies of Indigenous Resurgence in the Chaco by Joel E. Correia and Clemente Dermott

‘Inhabiting Otherwise’: Maasai Pastoralists’ Ontological Struggles Over Land in Tanzania by Leiyo Singo

Featured image: Drone photograph showing deforestation to establish new ranchlands in Paraguay’s Chaco. Select trees are left for shade. The dark lines are piles of vegetation left to dry before burning. Photograph by Joel E. Correia, 2019.