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- Tropical Materialisms: Toward Decolonial Poetics, Practices and
Possibilities
Authors: Christian Jil R. Benitez, Anita Lundberg
Pages: 1 - 20
Abstract: Tropical Materialisms concur on at least three things: humans are always entangled with non-human/material agents; such entanglement is necessary for any creative act to take place; and these same entanglements allow us to interrogate and re-evaluate preconceived notions about the world. This Special Issue aligns itself with the fields of new materialism and posthumanism. What is particularly exciting is the opportunity to rearticulate these fields in tropical terms, that is, with scholarly and creative practices from and about the tropical world. This focus is crucial given that current scholarship in new materialism and posthumanism predominantly comes from European temperate contexts and is informed by Western philosophies. In order to decolonize the ontological turn, this Special Issue recognises not only that colonial knowledge systems impacted the tropics, but also that matter’s liveliness was and is well understood in Indigenous cosmologies, ancient philosophies and ‘animist materialism’. The papers collected together in this special issue offers materialisms informed by decolonizing intuitions. They variously demonstrate how the tropics, as geographic zone and as pertaining to poetics (via "tropes"), can theoretically inform and historically problematise new materialism and posthumanism. They offer new vocabularies through which discourses on "tropical materialism" may be initiated; and a cartography of practices across disciplinary fields which demonstrate what this "tropical materialism" may be. The Special Issue collection it itself a form of poiesis: a creative engagement with the world.
PubDate: 2022-10-07
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.2.2022.3929
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 2 (2022)
- Mangrovian Encounters between Epistemologies of the South and New
(Feminist) Materialism
Authors: Aleida Luján Pinelo
Pages: 21 - 42
Abstract: With the increased interest sparked across academia in both new materialism and epistemologies of the South, old colonial and patriarchal habits rear their vicious heads. On the one hand, feminist contributions are, in many cases, ignored or watered down in mainstream discussions in both approaches, pushing feminist political projects at the core of these epistemologies to the margins. On the other hand, the engagement in conversations and commitment to the ideas that emerge from the epistemologies of the South are limited or not recognized, a situation that contributes to perpetuating coloniality of knowledge. Accounting for these challenges, this paper puts into conversation epistemologies of the South (focusing on theorists from the Americas) and new feminist materialism in terms of specific concepts such as dualism, difference, time, universality, body-land, and relationality. By showing both the affinities and differences between the two, this paper demonstrates the richness and diversity of arguments; furthermore, it investigates what new materialism has to do with decolonization and tropicality. This paper concludes by addressing the questions: to what extent and in what way might new (feminist) materialism need to be decolonized' And how does it speak to “tropical materialisms”' Although this paper does not specifically focus on the tropics, tropical images of thought such as the “mangrove,” are evoked throughout the text.
PubDate: 2022-10-07
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 2 (2022)
- Spiritual Materialism/ Material Spiritualism: Shakta Tantric Approaches to
Matter
Authors: Sudipta Chakraborty, Anway Mukhopadhyay
Pages: 43 - 64
Abstract: In opposition to ontological discourses that denigrate matter and uphold the superiority of the spirit, one can foreground the Shakta Tantric conceptualization of matter and spirit as interchangeable forces that inform the dynamics of the universe. Rather than seeing matter and spirit as incommensurable poles of a binary, Shakta Tantric yoga integrates them. This approach informs the Shakta Tantric universe of the renowned twentieth-century Bengali yogi, Vishuddhananda Paramahamsa whose Akhanda Mahayoga (Integral Great Yoga) integrates certain aspects of classical Yoga with Shakta Tantric discourses of dynamic matter, thereby enthusing the Shakta Tantric yogi to radically re-epistemologize “matter”. This paper explores how Vishuddhananda’s mode of yoga, through theory and praxis, gives rise to a unique philosophy of spiritual materialism or material spiritualism, foregrounding the ways the Divine Feminine – by revealing the fluid interplay of matter and spirit – forces us to jettison the binarization of these two aspects of existence. In the course of this exploration, the paper investigates whether and how the spiritual materialism/material spiritualism of Shakta Tantra may be seen as prefiguring the western discourses of New Materialism and Posthumanism. As Vishuddhananda hailed from Bengal, a tropical region of India celebrated for its association with Shaktism, the paper explores how his view of spiritual materialism may contribute to an emergent episteme of Tropical Materialisms by proposing a possible connection between such spiritual materialism and certain specific aspects of tropical nature that might have led to the Shakta “spiritualization” of its material dimensions.
PubDate: 2022-10-07
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 2 (2022)
- Graun Em Pulap Long Pipia: Rubbish, Sorcery, and Spiritual Healing, Papua
New Guinea
Authors: Daniela Vávrová
Pages: 65 - 76
Abstract: Bapra Simi, an Ambonwari spiritual healer living in the border town of Vanimo in Papua New Guinea comments that the “Earth is full of rubbish” and associates this material overflow with the possible causes and consequences of sorcery. This short explanatory paper accompanies the video entitled Bapra Simi, Glasmeri, Spiritual Healer, Papua New Guinea (Vávrová, 2020), which follows Bapra Simi through her material and spiritual healing practices, and her articulation of how these practices are situated in the material and spiritual world.
PubDate: 2022-10-07
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.2.2022.3884
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 2 (2022)
- Black Seed Dreaming: A Material Analysis of Bruce Pascoe’s
“Dark Emu”
Authors: Barbara Glowczewski, Anita Lundberg (Trans.)
Pages: 77 - 94
Abstract: Indigenous Australians are outstanding for the way their ontologies and practices do not rely on a Western dichotomy that opposes material and spiritual realms. Their multiple totemic visions of the Dreaming space-time always state a material actualisation in landscape and the reproduction of all forms of life based on the pluriversal agency of animals, plants, minerals, rain, wind, fire and stars. Such cosmovisions resonate with current debates in the fields of critical posthumanism and new materialism through an Animist materialism. Indeed, Indigenous Australian’s complex social practices offer ways of thinking and being for the whole planet in this time of climate crisis. This is particularly crucial for the tropical world which is so strongly impacted by climate change. Indigenous Australian cosmovisions offer to tropical studies a way of thinking politically about climate and the materiality of life. Thus, Tropical Materialisms are enhanced by the vast body of Indigenous experiences and creative productions in and beyond the tropics. The material analysis of the Aboriginal author Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, demonstrates how the book dared to challenge the Western written history, and to show a new relationality of being of humans with the more-than-human world.
PubDate: 2022-10-07
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.2.2022.3925
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 2 (2022)
- Vernacular Virtual: Toward a Philippine New Materialist Poetics
Authors: Christian Jil Benitez
Pages: 95 - 119
Abstract: This essay turns to and through the Philippine vernacular in order to open up the possibility of a new materialist regard of literature, one that specifically stems from the Philippine tropics. It proposes that the opportunity for such a tropical materialism rests on the onomatopoeism observed in the vernacular. Onomatopoeia, as a material linguistic principle, is recognized here to be most instructive in reunderstanding Philippine folk poetry — texts which date back to the precolonial period — in terms beyond mere representation. As a counterpoint to these traditional literary texts, the essay also ruminates on the poetry of Jose Garcia Villa, a prominent Filipino modernist writer, whose works in English are intuited here as demonstrative of the similar onomatopoeism found in Philippine folk poems. Although these literary materials might initially appear to be disparate and disconnected, the reading undertaken here nevertheless seeks to coincide these texts, bringing them into relation to highlight their possible yet understated entanglements, so as to ultimately motivate an intra-activity constitutive of contingent spatiotemporalities that may allow the emergence of a groundwork for a Philippine new materialist poetics.
PubDate: 2022-10-07
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.2.2022.3903
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 2 (2022)
- Into the Woods: Toward a Material Poetics of the Tropical Forest in
Philippine Literature
Authors: Glenn Diaz
Pages: 120 - 139
Abstract: This study considers how the tropical forest as a material and discursive space mediates the ways in which history is imagined in Philippine literary texts and literary production. Mobilizing ideas from new materialism, material poetics, and tropicality, the paper looks at generative moments from indigenous and revolutionary literature—two broad traditions whose conditions of possibility are inextricably linked with the materiality of the tropical forest and thus inevitably evince the structuring force of such nonhuman agencies and subjectivities. By disclosing how the “more than human” is constitutive of history and historical subject formation, it seeks to foreground the agency of Philippine forests in actively and collaboratively contesting the catastrophic violence of capital and state-making on people and the natural world.
PubDate: 2022-10-07
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.2.2022.3892
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 2 (2022)
- Colonial Abandonment and Hurricane María: Puerto Rican Material
Poetics as Survivance
Authors: Melinda González
Pages: 140 - 161
Abstract: In the wake of Hurricane María, Puerto Ricans in the tropical archipelago and the diaspora engaged in various forms of community organizing to confront governmental and social abandonment. Building on long-term ethnographic research and poetic analysis focused on the work of Puerto Rican poet Ana Portnoy Brimmer, I analyze poets’ critical and creative material practices that confronted histories of colonialism and engaged in forms of survivance post María (Vizenor, 2008). I argue that survivance is poiesis – a creative engagement in and with the world. Through writing and performing poems, Puerto Ricans contested state narratives about the effects of the hurricane, documented their material and diasporic suffering, and made their lives more livable through accessing necessities, such as food and water, building and reconnecting with community, and bearing witness to each other’s lived experiences. Puerto Rican life and experiences are always entangled with their environment and material world. Thus, for Puerto Ricans, survivance as poiesis is a continuous affirmation of life in the face of ongoing disasters and death through material poetic practices.
PubDate: 2022-10-07
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.2.2022.3893
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 2 (2022)
- Gardening in Polluted Tropics: The Materiality of Waste and Toxicity in
Olive Senior’s Caribbean Poetry
Authors: Ysabel Muñoz Martínez
Pages: 162 - 179
Abstract: While toxic substances continue increasingly, and unevenly, infiltrating the world, the new materialist turn invites us to examine the relationalities emerging between pollution and literature. This essay examines how Olive Senior’s poetry collection Gardening in the Tropics portrays the imposition of waste and toxicity on Caribbean islands and the counter-narratives to toxic politics that emerge from non-hegemonic perspectives. The paper utilizes methodological contributions from the fields of waste studies, postcolonial and material ecocriticism, and addresses the need for more scholarship centering toxicity in cultural studies, especially through the lens of tropical materialisms. Moreover, the research engages with theorizations surrounding the concept of the Wasteocene as a novel interpretative framework. The main findings reveal that the poems “My Father’s Blue Plantation”, “The Immovable Tenant” and “Advice and Devices” identify how extensive pollution is enabled and perpetuated by colonial systems. The poems illustrate the environmental and socio-political tensions prompted by toxicity, its deleterious effects in organisms and landscapes, and embody how guerrilla narratives can confront widespread toxicity.
PubDate: 2022-10-07
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.2.2022.3907
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 2 (2022)
- Marine Entanglements: Tropical Materialism and Hydrographic Imaginary in
Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon
Authors: Sanchar Sarkar, Swarnalatha Rangarajan
Pages: 180 - 197
Abstract: In the epoch of the Anthropocene the environment is predominantly characterised by innumerable entanglements of matter. According to materialist theorist Jane Bennett, matter acts as a ‘distributive agency’ that intertwines itself with a “multiplicity of other material bodies and formations'' across space and time (Khan, 2012, p. 42). Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Lagoon (2014) centres around the material entanglement scenario between oil and marine waters off the coast of Nigeria in Africa. Okorafor’s Afrofuturist Science Fiction narrative focuses on oil’s vitality and overwhelming presence in the tropical marinescape and elaborates on the significance of oil as a material determinant that forces us to rethink matter’s affective influence in the marinescapes of the tropics. This article analyses how human extracted matter like oil acts as a vital agentic force that confronts, reconfigures, and modifies the physical compositional properties of marine water. The article employs tropical materialism to study the performative role of matter as a ‘hyperobjective’ register within the constructed eco(aqua)-speculative and hydrographic imaginary of Okorafor’s Sci-Fi narrative.
PubDate: 2022-10-07
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.2.2022.3900
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 2 (2022)
- Some Things are not held together by Glue: Chunambo and other ‘Sticky
Matter’ in Subtropical Macao, China
Authors: Benjamin Kidder Hodges
Pages: 198 - 216
Abstract: This article uses adhesives or what I am calling here ‘sticky matter,’ to illustrate multispecies relationships in Macao, a subtropical coastal region in South China. It focuses primarily on a traditional rammed earth material known as chunambo in Macao and other former Portuguese colonies. Composed of oyster shell, straw, rice, local soils and sand chemically bounded together by slacked lime, this precursor to modern day concrete has a unique combination of porosity and structural integrity that makes it particularly adaptable to tropical climates and a contrast to contemporary building practices which are often designed to create sealed interior environments. Discussions of porosity within New Materialism, Urban Studies and Chinese aesthetics will be used to think stickiness alongside questions of material integrity in the face of sea level rise, erosion and anthropogenic forces. Much like limestone sediments formed over the course of thousands of years at the bottom of ancient tropical sea beds, chunambo invites speculation about material permanence in the face of climate futures and a changing urban environment.
PubDate: 2022-10-07
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.2.2022.3901
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 2 (2022)
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