Utopia and the Decolonial Imperative

My first book, Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World, is a study of 1990s US novels that explore the decolonial mandate of dismantling the world we live in under the capitalist mode of production—and of starting over. Written in genres ranging from historical realism to cli-fi apocalypse, and from a variety of subject positions, “decolonial fiction,” in the context of Angry Planet, means the desire, as the protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s 1999 The Intuitionist proposes, to “raze the city and cart off the rubble.”1 These stories are about the radical reconfiguration of the material conditions produced by the legacies of settler and extractive colonialism on the North American continent. This reconfiguration begins with a transformed relationship to land and land use. I argue that what leads the authors of angry planet fiction to this decolonial mandate is a shared narrative ontology: one that comprehends the planet we live on, our physical environment, including the dirt and rocks of the continent’s surface and subsurface, as sovereign and self-governing, and expressing fundamentally terrestrial political agendas and economic orders. This form of nonhuman sovereignty is visible in Whitehead’s novel about an elevator that crashes for no reason, as it is in Thomas King’s novel, Green Grass, Running Water (1993), about a river valley that will not accept the intrusive presence of a mega-dam. In angry planet fiction, the earth moves through valleys and cities both, as earthquakes and erosion, as crumbling coastlines and the contingent events that coalesce into freeway car crashes. What this narrative ontology taught me, throughout the course of this project, was how to read these crashes and infrastructural disasters as messages from an angry planet.As a periodizing project, Angry Planet situates this narrative ontology, found in the work of US authors ranging from Karen Tei Yamashita and John Edgar Wideman to Octavia Butler and Héctor Tobar, as thinking alongside the work of twentieth-century decolonial theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa, George Manuel, and Sylvia Wynter. During the post–Civil Rights Movement decades, these theorists began to publish writing on the connections between the immiseration produced by uneven development and property-centric land use, and couched in the material history of coloniality, and the environmental ruin produced by the racial capitalism that is coloniality’s mode of production. In foundational decolonial texts, which include Wynter’s “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” (1971), Manuel’s The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (1974), and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), each theorist looks to the ground beneath their feet in the Caribbean, Pacific Northwest, and Southwest, respectively. Each finds a terrestrial politics that rebels against the history of coloniality, during which exploitative land use came to inform “a process of dehumanization and alienation [that] was set in train” to dispossess communities of color and to destroy the physical environment via the same processes.2A few years later, in the 1980s and ’90s, we see the first iterations of new materialist and actor-network theory in the works of Louis Althusser, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Jane Bennett, as well as the early speculative materialisms of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit based in Warwick (UK).3 These strands of theoretical commitment shared a rejection of the postmodern and postcolonial turns in favor of, respectively, decolonial materialisms and post-Marxist and post-Hegelian materialisms. However, these respective strands, despite both rejecting anthropocentrism and apprehending the inherently politicized content of ontological inquiry, were far from in conversation with each other. A schism reverberated throughout much new materialist discourse, including early object-oriented theory’s resistance to acknowledging the long intellectual histories of Indigenous and African diasporic ontological orders. Ultimately, decolonial materialists would argue that thinking with and through the nonhuman world brings us back to the problem of the construction of the human, while many new materialists argued that thinking nonhuman agency was a welcome circumvention, if not escape, from that very problem.In the space of this first-book roundtable, and in the spirit of utopian thinking, I contend that new materialism’s failure to acknowledge non-Eurocentric ontologies appears now, in the twenty-first century, as a problem of solidarity. The significance and the challenge of forming solidarities takes on a central role in many of the political movements of recent decades, from pan-ethnic organizing around the Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter interventions, to coalition-building in opposition to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, to the self-identification of marginalized collectivities based in renewed white nationalisms. Whether these visions of solidarity are utopian or dystopian, they represent a profound political desire that emerges, I argue, from the disappointments of a post-neoliberal world order marked by the democratic failures of globalization. The late-twentieth-century decolonial materialisms explored in Angry Planet probe the roots of these failures, showing that the processes of economic globalization were far from smooth. Authors tracked this unevenness across the North American continent through the structural and infrastructural shapes of colonial history producing the continent’s environmentally damaged physical terrains. In turn, the problem of this unevenness leads late-twentieth-century materialist thinkers with shared commitments to social justice and environmental politics to travel along parallel but oppositional trajectories, creating impasses to solidarity between the groups, and frustrating the utopian promise of a radically reimagined and rebuilt world.Utopian historian Gregory Claeys stresses that community and equality are core tenets of utopian thought, and defines solidarity as “the willingness to lend our support to others based on a feeling and ideal of fellow humanity, and of sameness and common interest.”4 But the theoretical commitments I describe add to this definition an insistence that common interests among humans start with the object world surrounding us: consideration of land-use, first; ideals of fellow humanity, to follow. In this vein, angry planet fiction powerfully describes how humans might better align themselves with the nonhuman environment, to create a pathway toward decolonization, and away from environmental ruin. Where both narrative and theory are less confident is in describing how humans can come into solidarity with each other as we move toward realigning ourselves with the earth. In other words, if the angry planet presents itself as an ally to the dispossessed in this fiction, it is more difficult for the earth’s angry people to find allyship with each other.Secwépemc leader and pan-Indigenous global organizer George Manuel, for example, posited a decolonial utopian vision of the Fourth World, a “new Indian reality” shaped by Indigenous intelligence and land use. Manuel’s Fourth World model presented what he saw as a genuine alternative for newly decolonizing Third World nations that were otherwise occupied with bringing their conceptions of nationhood into line with capitalist democracies. Instead, Manuel advocated for a return to modes of Indigenous human–nonhuman relations that reject land exploitation and private property ownership in favor of what he called an environmental economy.5 For him, a respectful economic relationship to land use—one led by what we learn from the land—is necessarily a conduit to better relations among humans. But Manuel is equally qualified in his belief in the potential for this Indigenous utopia to materialize as a truly universal project. The Fourth World is both a destination (a new reality) and something already around us; it is at once the world to be and the world crisscrossed by the scar tissue of our current economic order. The Fourth World is, in short, both everywhere and nowhere (a non-place), suggesting, Manuel writes, that “The Fourth World is not, after all, a Final Solution. It is not even a destination. It is the right to travel freely, not only on our road but in our own vehicles.”6 In other words, while pointing to the Fourth World’s omnipresence, Manuel acknowledges, gently, that the journey to this utopia begins with a return to Indigenous spaces by Indigenous communities. Solidarity among all human groups is not foreclosed here, but nor is it a priority.For those Manuel calls non-Indian “discoverers” grasping after some kind of survivable future, the process may instead be more individuated.7 The journey to the Fourth World is not for everyone at the same time or along the same itinerary. Jayna Brown suggests as much in her recent project, Black Utopias: “To imagine as best we can outside the . . . epistemological and ontological circumscriptions [of human domination] does not mean we save the human race, at least not that race as we know it. Salvage may not be possible at this point, although this is not necessarily a catastrophe.”8 Not necessarily a catastrophe, but this is the problem encountered by both the politics of decolonization and of utopia. Perhaps becoming a utopian begins with an individual journey, as Tom Moylan suggests, but if we press on Manuel’s metaphor of travel, where precisely on the route does an individual join the collective, particularly a preexisting collective? Where, to quote Moylan, do we “enter into a radical utopian structure of feeling that nurtures collective solidarity and action in anticipatory harmony with all humanity and all of nature”?9 Angry Planet is a project whose utopian impulses stall at precisely this question, and do so both in terms of those forms of collectivity whose interests and histories of struggle are distinct, and before the threat of utopia confined to, in Jameson terms, “the spectacle of a First World gated community surrounded by a world of starving enemies.”10This problem of stalling at the threshold to decolonial futurity and to the realization of utopian imaginaries is well-articulated in the work of the late Mike Davis.11 In particular, Davis insistently characterizes the tensions between precariously situated BIPOC urban populations and neoliberal state power as “low-intensity warfare”; this theoretical model could also describe the spatial politics in angry planet fiction. As a dialectical materialist, Davis’s project was always about describing the predatory relationship between these two worlds. His 1995 essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” was one starting point for my own understanding of how political economy allows us to trace the entanglements of public policy, urban planning, and private investment, such that one community—wealthy, white, imbricated in a delusional utopian fantasy of fabulous California coastal living—can protect its property and property investments from wildfires at the direct expense of another community—low-income, precariously employed, undocumented, sweating it out ten miles in-land and thirty miles from Malibu—which is regularly ravaged by tenement fires. Davis’s essay powerfully links the City of Los Angeles’s refusal to regulate slum lords to the massive resources it devotes to the protection of Malibu mansions that burn down again and again. “Suffocating in their tiny rooms,” Davis writes, “immigrant families flee to the fire escapes, stoops, and sidewalks. . . . Amidst hundreds of acres of molten asphalt and concrete there is scarcely a weed, much less a lawn or tree.”12 These were the terrains that I wanted to write about, terrains where the connections Davis made between racial violence, economic inequality, and environmental ruin could also be read in crumbling concrete, in smog-choked heatwaves, and in the exothermic trajectories of prevailing winds. These urban hellscapes speak convincingly to the dystopian turn found in so much US fiction in the 1980s and ’90s. Indeed, Davis’s body of work suggests that the dystopian pessimism of these decades was present not only in its speculative fiction, but also in this world’s local histories and real conditions of existence.That being said, “it would be a mistake,” Madeline Lane-McKinley suggests, “to understand Davis’s writing as dystopian, just because his object of study has been our dystopia.”13 For Davis, “dystopia” is the name for the neoliberal order: not only because of the extensive swaths of toxic environments that partition the global informalized labor economy; but also because the creation of these environments is the direct consequence of the production of the so-called evil paradises of the ultra-wealthy.14 Indeed, for Davis, dystopian urban conditions, as they move from the erasure of an urban commons in the 1990s to the over-urbanization of the planet in this century, are just one aspect of our current “space of unresolvable contradictions defined by “three coordinates. Two of them are knowable: the nature of the crisis and its solution, that is to say the calamity and the utopia, but the third coordinate, the means to bring about the solution, the politics of change, is missing. With no army of liberation in sight,” Davis writes, “critique is futile and paradoxically, more urgent than ever.”15That third coordinate is Angry Planet’s focus, as it explores a 1990s literary landscape that I call “the American Third World” in an attempt to re-historicize and reterritorialize the term for US contexts. The use of the term “Third World” in Angry Planet references in part its usage by US communities of color who identified, during the second half of the twentieth century, with the freedom struggles of Third World populations; but the term also carries pejorative connotations that eventually pushed it out of fashion. Angry Planet’s reference to “the American Third World” is intended to describe precisely the terrains evoked by Davis in his work: an ostensibly First World nation of wealthy white enclaves built on the primitive accumulative base of colonial capitalist land theft, slavery, and environmental exploitation. This terrain is riddled with what we once called “archipelagos,” but which we can now better understand as “mainlands” of human depredation and suffering as brutal and as difficult to survive as anywhere in the world.Angry planet fiction, I argue, identifies the intersecting environmental and social crises that shape the post–Cold War conclusion to the twentieth century—and then proposes a solution: forge solidarities among the planet’s oppressed people to create that “army of liberation” Davis evokes; overthrow capitalism; decolonize the surface of the North American continent. This must be done by abolishing property rights, and razing and rebuilding cities as collectivist utopias that are modeled after the planet’s own demands and imperatives. Rather than understanding the physical environment as an anthropogenically damaged object, angry planet authors invoke a furious planetary body that rejects the colonial-capitalist social order and also clearly articulates—in the movement of wildfires, earthquakes, flooding, and even urban decay—its own ideas for how human political and economic order should be managed. This would enable the creation of an “inclusive” utopian solidarity that expresses itself as a survivable relationship between people and planet. The revolutionary collectives seen in these novels draw their decolonial, anti-capitalist mandate from the motion of the planet, what Leslie Marmon Silko calls “the earth’s outrage and the trembling that will not stop”15; and what Linda Hogan calls “defiance . . . spoken in the language of the earth.”16 In all of these novels, the dispossessed peoples of Turtle Island’s slums,17 borderlands, reservations, tent cities, gutted farmlands, and freeway underbellies, listen to the earth’s language, and follow the motions of the angry planet. They consequently forge interethnic and interspecies solidarities, and seek either to fight for liberation or to model iterations of freedom and community they find in that planetary motion.But this is still the 1990s. Its literature lives with the dystopia so convincingly mapped by Davis’s urban geographies, and lives at the threshold of a decolonial futurity that, as I suggest above, never to be its narrative the neoliberal with its on and its to and the journey toward possible for humanity as a to radically the for own relationship with the earth we see this in novels such as or Octavia defines her against “the outside the of her own gated As much as the authors of angry planet fiction can imagine the politics of that Davis identifies as our coordinate, they move from the of those politics and into the of a new they as in John Edgar in or Karen Tei freeway in of the of these concrete utopias to be such a threat to state power that they are by “the of nations down as it in the on tiny and the of and in a The imbricated of and state power the what the messages from the angry failure to move colonial-capitalist state power has to do in part with the earth’s own as an the planet moves in not by global capitalist economic and angry planet imagine that this motion has the potential to be so as to challenge even to from its But the planet is also fundamentally an and oppositional and in this it is in my as it is of the crises in solidarity that Davis will into more to themselves off from the of and toward for earth’s This vision of also is a new of for the a for the this is also Manuel’s Fourth World in which marginalized communities the space and sovereignty to outside the of and to everyone these visions of human collectivity are parallel but The decolonial their utopias via intellectual and than in the but in both the same conditions a relationship to the seen as the and of these set against the of the of the world’s who may or may in their own time and at their own to or Fourth World, uneven terrains of globalization and of the angry planet both as material conditions producing the that as Davis suggests, the real challenge of utopian utopia has to be for it has to bring everyone This is only possible through and of global solidarity. decolonial including and and Sylvia that the to global solidarity will be as anywhere from do not all on what decolonization looks in Wynter’s terms, our current order of Angry planet fiction us at the of the twentieth at this to the decolonial and to utopian the shared problem of solidarity between these two agendas does suggest that the decolonial mandate some and to imagine the the kind of solidarities that can interests from as Davis in the of as utopian for the same to a decolonial to the utopian to the of that are as radically as are our In both it that solidarity must come but that the material of such a community politics and as the to its own