‘To unawaken’d earth’: Paul Carter’s archipelagic poetics of decolonization

Abstract

If locating the self and owning one’s story are good starting points for an ethical hermeneutics, as the author of Decolonising Governance suggests, then I could do worse than introducing myself, and locating myself vis-à-vis this challenging and rewarding work, before attempting to appraise or anatomize it. I am a teacher of English literature, and my relatively insular intellectual training and academic background – in a post-colonial India still attempting to decolonize the academy – posed a considerable challenge to the process of interpreting and contextualizing this richly interdisciplinary book. While interdisciplinarity is – in talk if not always in practice – widely touted in English Studies in India, thinking from within disciplinary silos has proven to be a difficult habit to break. I am grateful that this book gave me the opportunity to stray from the continent of my own ways of knowing. Decolonising Governance is an important contribution to Indigenous decolonization theory that champions the archipelago as a conceptual framework useful for a poetic re-education that the author sees as necessary for a decolonized governance, particularly of ecologically threatened spaces. To me, the importance of this book lies in its proposing a reconciliation between decolonization and globalization. While resistance to colonialism has often been theorized in terms of Manichaean opposition, what Paul Carter offers, drawing on thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur and Édouard Glissant, and in line with more recent work in decolonization that pays attention to a plurality of voices, is a framework that looks beyond binaries. The emphasis here is on cooperation and relationality rather than antagonism; albeit a co-operation that can only begin with a mutual acknowledgement of the mythopoeic processes that underpin the grand narratives of both the Western nation-state and Indigenous socio-political formations.