Decolonial Hope

Planetary Sustainability and Literary Responses
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-041-40759-1
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 166 Seiten, Format (B × H): 174 mm x 246 mm

This book advances the cultivation of decolonial hope as a transformative framework for reimagining development through kinship, accountability, and ecological care. Positioning decolonial hope as both concept and praxis, it offers a critical intervention that challenges imperial legacies while advocating for just and equitable societies that honor human and non-human agencies alike. Central to this vision is the recognition that ethics, rights, and morals must be foundational to any sustainable future. The book foregrounds ecologies of care as integral to decolonial hope, bringing visibility to marginalized and unacknowledged ecological knowledge systems that sustain planetary well-being. By affirming plural epistemologies of the ecosystem in an era of polycrisis, it resists universal or utopian futures in favor of polyphonic narratives that emerge from diverse intellectual, epistemological, social, and pedagogical practices. These convergent approaches enable an unrestricted decolonial praxis oriented toward planetary justice and sustainability across cultures. Through carefully curated contributions, the editors present multiple perspectives and expressions of activism, solidarity, and justice within literary works, offering multifaceted conceptual frameworks that illuminate the significance of cultivating relationships with the natural world and provide constructive pathways toward sustainable, inclusive, and coexistence-oriented futures.

This book is intended for students, academics, independent scholars and researchers in postcolonial literature, decolonial studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and related interdisciplinary fields. It will also appeal to those engaged with climate justice, ecological philosophy, and alternative epistemologies seeking to understand how literary and cultural practices can contribute to transformative social and environmental change.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate, Undergraduate Advanced, and Undergraduate Core

Autoren/Hrsg.

Karmakar, Goutam

Wilson, Janet

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Kolonialismus, Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Contextualizing decolonial hope: Thinking for coexistence and planetary sustainability 1. The hopeful possibilities of “sideways” time: Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God 2. “This grief not only ours to bear”: Hope in shalan joudry’s Km+tkinu (Homeland) 3. Hopegoing: Animist metaphor as deferred hope in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing 4. To hope or to weep? Slow hope in Rohan Chakravarty’s green humour series 5. Making it hot: Eco-militancy and survivance in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were 6. Entangled futures: Energy production, ecospirituality, and decolonial hope in Indian solarpunk fiction 7. Love and landscape: Decolonial resistance, solidarity, and hope in The God of Small Things 8. Dismantling cyborg politics: Decolonial hope in Chinese science fiction 9. Countering capitalist ethics: Ecological empathy, hope, and environmental education in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass

Über Autor(innen)

Goutam Karmakar teaches in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad, India, with affiliations and research positions at Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities, University of Cologne, Germany, and the Faculty of Arts and Design, Durban University of Technology, South Africa. He has received several fellowships, including the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in Germany, National Research Foundation awards in South Africa, and the MIASA Individual Fellowship in Ghana. His research spans Global South literature, postcolonial and decolonial studies, cultural studies, and environmental humanities. Karmakar edits the journal Global South Literary Studies and the Routledge book series South Asian Literature in Focus.

Janet M. Wilson is Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. She earlier taught for a decade in the Department of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Her research spans postcolonial memory, diaspora, authorship, transculturalism, and the cultural politics of Aotearoa/New Zealand. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and has co-edited volumes on postcolonial writing, transnationalism, and diaspora. She is Co-Editor of the series Studies in World Literature (Ibidem), Chair of Challenging Precarity: A Global Network, and recently co-edited Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis: Planetary Precarity and Future Habitability (2025).