The nonhuman turn or a re-turn to animism? Valuing life along and beyond capital

Abstract

In this commentary, I point out that Büscher and other critics of the nonhuman turn ignore insights offered by Feminist, Black and Indigenous scholarship that help rethink the human and alternate worldmaking possibilities. The healthy corrective to the somewhat apolitical celebration of liveliness and entanglements in Western new materialist and posthumanism literature, that Büscher and others seek, already exists in Feminist, Black and Indigenous scholarship and practices, and in activism for environmental and climate justice around the world. In these times of deep ecological crises and precarity, we would do well to turn to the wisdom of Indigenous Peoples and other land-based cultures that embody and live by some of the central propositions of the ‘nonhuman turn’. I argue that the central propositions of nonhuman turn – relationality and interdependence; decentring and rethinking the human; honouring the agency, intelligence and subjecthood of other beings – offer alternate ways of doing politics and of imagining and enacting pluriversal, postcapitalist worlds. If this is not grounds for radical ecopolitics, then what is?