Postcolonial Lithographies

This article explores how considerations of deep time—not just deep human histories, but inhuman ones as well—can help us re-evaluate postcolonial literary works in the wake of the Anthropocene. I focus on the representation of “lithic time” through a reading of the Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Slave Old Man. Chamoiseau’s novel has had some traction in animal studies recently because of his conjoined portrayal of the mutual degradation and eventual enslavement of a human and a dog in a colonial plantation in Martinique. I argue, however, that a consideration of stones and lithic time in the novel facilitates a push beyond the located aspects of interspecies relationships and opens portals to contemplations of the inhuman dimensions of geohistorical time. This article looks at the inhuman temporal dimensions of stone in Chamoiseau’s novel, while simultaneously reflecting on how a deep time perspective can assist us in reconceptualizing postcolonial literary analytical strategies.