Decolonizing the Anthropocene: ‘Slow Violence’ and Indigenous Resistance in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves

Chiara Xausa

doi:10.30687/tol/2499-5975/2020/22/022

Abstract

Through a reading of Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 young adult novel The Marrow Thieves, a survival story set in a futuristic Canada destroyed by global warming, this article explores the conceptualization and reimagination of the Anthropocene in contemporary postcolonial and Indigenous theory and fiction. Firstly, I will argue that literary representations of climate change can be complicit in producing hegemonic strands of Anthropocene discourse that consider human destructiveness and vulnerability at undifferentiated species level. Secondly, I will suggest that the novel’s apocalypse reveals the processes of colonial violence and dispossession that have culminated in the eruptive event of environmental catastrophe, rather than portraying a story of universal and disembodied human threat that conceals oppression against Indigenous people.

Highlights

In the past two decades, climate change and its effects have been articulated in a range of literary works and have especially become major trends in anglophone fiction
A lot of literary criticism has explored the cultural challenges of writing climate fiction, and the ecopolitical value of environmental literature
Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra have been increasingly investigating the main challenges faced by authors of climate fiction, such as the more-thanhuman complexity of climate change, the novel’s anthropocentric tendencies, the planetary scale and the slowly unfolding pace of human environmental impact

Summary

Decolonizing the ‘Anthropos’

In the past two decades, climate change and its effects have been articulated in a range of literary works and have especially become major trends in anglophone fiction. The ‘Anthropos’ after which geologists have named the current epoch does not seem to have a class, a race, a gender and, by inviting us to think at undifferentiated species level, runs the risk of erasing power hierarchies As such, this universalizing logic has led many scholars to prefer more revealing terms (such as Capitalocene [Haraway 2015; Moore 2015; Malm 2016], Eurocene [Grove 2016] or White Supremacy Scene [Mirzoeff 2016]) over Anthropocene. Postcolonial, decolonial and critical race studies join hands with ecofeminism(s) to posit that the dichotomy between humans and nonhumans is developed alongside racial and gendered hierarchies of difference (Gergan et al 2018) and to challenge the ‘racial blindness’ (Yusoff 2018) and gender blindness of the universal human subject (read: white maleness) implied in the concept of the Anthropocene

A Silencing Apocalypse

Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves