Waste Ecologies and Decoloniality in the Tropical Futurisms of Shiv Ramdas’s Domechild (2013)

This article engages in a decolonial reading of Shiv Ramdas’s Domechild (2013), delving into how the novel constructs futurisms to dismantle Western structures of dominance and control. It explicates tropical futurisms as orienting components that alert readers to disrupt epistemic singularity and imperial hegemony by insisting upon pluralized possible futures. Domechild fictionalizes a bifurcated world—City and Sanctuary—that interrogates the socio-material practices of waste(ing) as enduring legacies of colonialism. This study argues that Ramdas’s meta-theoretical speculative fiction probes discard ecologies by instituting waste as both ecosophical matter and an agential force against the ramifications of colonial-capitalist epistemologies. In this regard, Marco Armiero’s (2021) Wasteocene is explored by reimagining the structural interplay of capitalism, technology, and the enduring colonial legacies of binomial dispossession and systemic inequality in tropical regions. The following analysis serves as a dialogue between Ramdas’s narrative fiction and decolonial theory, reifying the necessity of epistemic disobedience.