The slave ship or modernity’s hold

… [M]y second proposition takes the Caribbean world as the scene of ecological thinking. Why the Caribbean? Firstly, because it was here that the Old World and the New World were first knotted together in an attempt to make the Earth and the world into one and the same totality. Eye of modernity’s hurricane, the Caribbean is that center where the sunny lull was wrongly confused for paradise, the fixed point of a global acceleration sucking up African villages, Amerindian societies, and European sails. This “Caribbean world” therefore concentrates experiences of the world that range from colonial and enslaving histories to the underside of modernity, histories which are not limited to the geographical boundaries of the Caribbean basin. This gesture is a response to the absence of these Caribbean experiences within those ecological discourses that nevertheless claim to question the same modernity. While researchers have been interested in the ecological consequences of colonization in the Caribbean and North America, the consequences of global warming, and contemporary environmental politics, the Caribbean is most often seen as the place for experimenting with concepts that come from somewhere else.[i] The colonial gaze is maintained by the scholar who departs from the Global North and carries in his suitcase concepts that are to be experimented with in a non-scholarly Caribbean, before he leaves again with the fruits of this new knowledge, now capable of prescribing the way forward. Such an approach hides the imperial conditions that allowed, in the Caribbean and other colonial spaces, the development of sciences such as botany, the emergence of forest conservation management,[ii] and the genesis of the concept of biodiversity,[iii] and ignores the other forms of knowledge concerning the environment and the body that were already there.[iv] Above all, one would miss those Caribbean ecologists who go “beyond sand and sun” by holding together social justice, antiracism, and ecosystem preservation.[v]

            A contrario, I embrace the Caribbean world as a scene of ecological thinking. Thinking ecology from the perspective of the Caribbean world proposes an epistemic shift in the conceptualizations of the world and the Earth at the heart of ecology, meaning that there is a change of scene from which discourses and knowledge are produced. Instead of the scene of a free, educated, and well-to-do White man wandering the countryside of Georgia like John Muir, or in the forest of Montmorency like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or around Walden’s

pond like Henry David Thoreau, I suggest another scene that took place historically at the same time: one of violence inflicted upon men and women in slavery, dominated socially and politically inside the holds of slave ships. North–South power relations, racisms, historical

and modern slavery, the resentments, fears, and hopes that constitute the experience of the world, are placed at the heart of the ship where the ecological tempest is seen and confronted.

            Within a binary understanding of modernity, one that opposes nature and culture, colonists and indigenous people, this proposition instead highlights the experiences of modernity’s third terms.[vi] I am referring to those who were dismissed when, in the sixteenth

century, the priest Bartolomé de Las Casas, famous in the Valladolid controversy of 1550, defended the Amerindians against the Spanish conquerors with an appeal that was accompanied by repeated suggestions to “stock up” in Africa and develop triangular trade.[vii] Neither modern nor indigenous, more than 12.5 million Africans were uprooted from their lands from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Hundreds of millions of people were enslaved and kept for centuries in an off-ground [hors-sol] relationship to the Americas.[viii] Over and above the social conditions of the colonial enslaved, they were also considered “Negroes,” object-beings of a political and scientific racism that indexes them to an inextricable immanence with nature or to an unsurpassable pathological irresponsibility. However, the so-called Negroes also developed relationships with nature, ecumenes, ways of relating to non-humans, and ways of representing the world to themselves. It so happens that these ideas and practices were marked by slavery, by the experience of transshipment in the Atlantic slave trade, and by political and social discrimination for several centuries in Africa, Europe, and the Americas.[ix] Yes, there is also an ecology of the enslaved, of those transshipped in the European trade, an ecology that maintains continuities with the indigenous African and Amerindian communities but is not reducible to either of them.[x] An ecology that was forged in modernity’s hold: a decolonial ecology.

            Decolonial ecology articulates the confrontation of contemporary ecological issues through an emancipation from the colonial fracture, by rising up from the slave ship’s hold. The urgency of the struggle against both global warming and the pollution of the Earth is intertwined with the urgency of political, epistemic, scientific, legal, and philosophical struggles to dismantle the colonial structures of living together and the ways of inhabiting the Earth that still maintain the domination of racialized people, particularly women, in modernity’s hold. This decolonial ecology is inspired by the decolonial thinking that was begun by a group of Latin American researchers and activists, such as Anibal Quijano, Arturo Escobar, Catherine Walks, and Walter Mignolo, who were and are working to dismantle an understanding of power, knowledge, and Being that has been inherited from colonial modernity and its racial categories. They emphasize those other ways of thinking that emerge from “the spaces that have been silenced, repressed, demonized, devaluated by the triumphant chant of self-promoting modern epistemology, politics, and economy and its internal dissensions.”[xi]

            The decolonial ecology that I am proposing is different from this current of thought because the central focus is on the experiences of the third terms of modernity and the slave ship, the fundamental experiences of those Black Africans now in the Caribbean who were uprooted from Africa and enslaved.[xii] This gesture is linked to Africana philosophy, which allows the thinking to resurface, history, and philosophies of Africans and African Americans and is represented by the work of Valentin Mudimb., Cheikh Anta Diop, Cedric Robinson, Sylvia Wynter, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Lewis Gordon, and Norman Ajari.[xiii] Decolonial ecology aims to restore Black people’s dignity in the wake of the battles waged by Aimé Césaire and Maryse Condé, by Toussaint Louverture and Rosa Parks, by Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X, by Frantz Fanon and Christiane Taubira. Finally, thinking from within the slave ship’s hold is also a matter of gender. The separation that often took place inside the hold, where men are placed on one side and women and children on the other, underlines the different forms of oppression these third terms experience. Decolonial ecology fully agrees with feminist and, singularly, Black feminist critiques that show the intricacies of gendered domination within the racist constitutions of nation-states, critical work such as that of Elsa Dorlin, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Eleni Varikas, bell hooks, and Angela Y. Davis.[xiv]

            This is not an ecology that is to be applied to people of color and formerly colonized territories, like an additional shelf on a bookcase that is already established, as has been proposed by some.[xv] Decolonial ecology shatters the environmentalist framework for understanding the ecological crisis by including from the outset this confrontation with the world’s colonial fracture and by pointing to another genesis of ecological concern. In this way, I agree with the advances of the environmental justice movements[xvi] and postcolonial ecocriticism.[xvii] The concepts of “environmental racism,” “environmental colonialism,” “ecological imperialism,” and “green orientalism” describe how environmental pollution and degradation, as well as certain preservation politics, reinforce domination over the poor and racialized.[xviii] The critique of the destruction of the planet’s ecosystems is then intimately tied to the critique of colonial and postcolonial dominations and to demands for equality.

[i] See, for example, John R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Michelle Scobie, Global Governance and Small States: Architectures and Agency in the Caribbean (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2019).

[ii] Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

[iii] Megan Raby, American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

[iv] Pablo Gomez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

[v] Sherrie L. Baver and Barbara D. Lynch (eds), Beyond Sand and Sun: Caribbean Environmentalisms (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Malcom Ferdinand, “Ecology, Identity, and Colonialism in Martinique: The Discourse of an Ecological NGO (1980 2011),” in Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett (eds), The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016); Rivke Jaffe, Concrete Jungles: Urban Pollution and the Politics of Difference in the Caribbean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Eloise C. Stancioff, Landscape, Land-Change and Well-Being in the Lesser Antilles: Case Studies from the Coastal Villages of St. Kitts and the Kalinago Territory, Dominica (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2018); Karen Baptiste and Kevon Rhiney, “Climate Justice and the Caribbean,” Geoforum 73 (2016): 17–80.

[vi] Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

[vii] Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 151–2; André Saint-Lu, “Bartolomé de Las Casas et la traite des Négres,” Bulletin Hispanique 94/1 (1992): 39–40.

[viii] Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Black in Latin America (New York: New York University Press, 2011). [Translator’s note: Hors-sol is translated as “off-ground,” though sol may also be translated as “land” or “soil.” Land would suggest a focus on sovereignty that is not intended, and soil loses the metaphorical valance of the term. Ground should be read as referring to the material ground of the soil and the abstract ground of existence.]

[ix] Roger Bastide, African Civilizations in the New World, trans. Geoffrey Parrinder (London: Hurst, 1971); Richard Price (ed.), Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Christine Chivallon, Espace et identité à la Martinique: paysannerie des Mornes et reconquête collective, 1840–1960 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1998); Arturo Escobar, Sentir-penser avec la Terre: l’écologie au-delà de l’Occident, trans. Roberto Andrade Pérez et al. (Paris: Seuil, 2018); Catherine Benoît, Corps, jardins, mémoires: anthropologie du corps et de l’espace à la Guadeloupe (Paris: CNRS Éditions & Maisons des Sciences de l’homme, 2000).

[x] Translator’s note: “Transshipped” normally translates the French transbordés in normal instances of commercial and nautical usages of the term. The meaning intended here is derived from Glissant’s usage of the term in his Le Discours antillais. There “transshipped” is used to describe the experience of Africans who were kidnapped, enslaved, and forcibly transported to the Americas and changed “into something different.” This is in distinction to the form of forced movement and experience of being “transplanted,” suffered by other oppressed peoples who nevertheless still maintain their original identity in the new environment. This term is not translated consistently in the English edition of Glissant, but readers can consult Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virigina, 1989), pp. 14–16.

[xi] Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (eds), Globalization and the Decolonial Option (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 2.

[xii] Regarding the forgetting of Haiti in decolonial thought, see Adler Camilus, “Conflictualités et politique comme oublié du citoyen,” PhD thesis, University of Paris VIII, under the direction of Georges Navet, 2015.

[xiii] Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy; Nick Nesbit, Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Dialogue with the Western Tradition, trans. Jonathan Adjemian

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 46–54; Ajari, La Dignité ou la mort; Katherine McKittrick (ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

[xiv] Elsa Dorlin, La Matrice de la race: généalogie sexuelle et colonial de la nation (Paris: La Découverte, 2009); Anne Berger and Eleni Varikas (eds), Genre et postcolonialismes: dialogues transcontinentaux (Paris: éditions Archives contemporaines, 2011); bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism (London: Routledge, 2015); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241–99.

[xv] Deane Curtin, Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); William Adams and Martin Mulligan (eds), Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era (London: Earthscan, 2003).

[xvi] Robert Bullard (ed.), Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994); Ryan Holifield, Jayajit Chakraborty, and Gordon Walker, The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice (London: Routledge, 2018); David V. Carruthers (ed.), Environmental Justice in Latin America: Problems, Promise, and Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); David McDonald, Environmental Justice in South Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2002); David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

[xvii] Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley (eds), Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan, Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (New York: Routledge, 2015); Helen Tiffin and Graham Huggan, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London: Routledge, 2009); Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt, Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010); Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environment: Nature, Culture, and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Campbell and Niblett, The Caribbean; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).

[xviii] Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1986] 2004); Benjamin Chavis, Jr., Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York: Commission for Racial Justice Public Data Access, 1987); Larry Lohman, “Green Orientalism,” The Ecologist 23/6 (1993): 202–4; Robert H. Nelson, “Environmental Colonialism: ‘Saving’ Africa from Africans,” Independent Review 8/1 (2003): 65–86.

Spratt, Rachel. Review of Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, by Malcom Ferdinand. Environmental Philosophy, vol. 19, no. 2, 2022, pp. 319–322, https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil2022192127.

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Malcolm Ferdinand speaking at conference “On Enclosed Spaces and the Great Outdoors,” Flemish Cultural Center
February 2020

Decolonising Ecology, Malcolm Ferdinand with Romy Opperman Digital Lecture Series
Winter 2022

Malcom Ferdinand, "A World Beyond the Colonial Epistemology: Writing With Engagement"
The New Vocabularies, New Grammars: Imagining Other Worlds series
The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, UC Berkeley March 2022

Thinking from the Caribbean World Talk with Malcom Ferdinand and Shela Sheikh
Books for Thought, in partnership with Polity The French Institute, London
February 2022