Hospicing the Broken Earth: World-building stories as worlding stories

Abstract

This article constellates N.K Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy with decolonial epistemologies to push the boundaries of storied curricula and explore how we come to know. I argue that the imaginative world-building of science fiction can serve as worlding stories—not wording stories—that act, move, and connect knowledge, reader/listener, and writer/teller in ways that interrupt modern/colonial logics and invite otherwise orientations to teaching, learning, and knowledge. Worlding stories center dynamic, living, moving, changing relationships between text, reader, writer, and world. Using language “to world” is thus fundamentally different from using language in order “to word,” a move that modernity/coloniality relies on to categorize reality into objective, separate, fixed boxes. In order to discuss science fiction as worlding stories and therefore decolonial curriculum, I first situate speculative fiction within epistemologies that embrace what is invisible, intangible, imagined, and alien. I then present worlding stories as theoretical framework and methodology. To use language “to world” in this article, I tell a worlding story of my own. After the telling, I discuss how the The Broken Earth danced with decolonial theories to shift my orientation to stories as curriculum. I conclude by emphasizing worlding stories’ epistemological resistance: a relationship between author–reader-text-life that creates space to imagine “the way world ends… for the last time” and “how a new world begins.”