Precarity and the stories we tell: Post-truth discourse and Indigenous epistemologies in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle

ABSTRACT

This article stems from the assumption that the stories emerging from distinct cultural traditions constitute discrete epistemologies that determine how human individuals and societies face ontological vulnerability and precariousness. Focusing on Thomas King’s novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), it examines the differential agency of two interlocking sets of stories and their respective epistemological systems. Consequently, the article is divided in two main parts. The first examines the novel’s rendering of the tensions between the Enlightenment’s investment in the search for empirical truth, and its current alignment with unfettered neo-liberal capitalism and post-truth discourse. The second part reads the novel’s use of ancestral Indigenous stories as a counterpoint to the stories of modern progress underlying western epistemologies. The emerging question is whether Indigenous ways of knowing embedded in ancestral stories may potentially show the way towards an “ecology of knowledges” that lessens precarity and works towards ecological sustainability.

KEYWORDS:

• Storytelling
• neo-liberalism
• anthropocentrism
• ecocentricism
• (post-)truth
• Indigenous epistemologies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. King, who was born in the US and moved to Canada in 1980, self-identifies as being of Cherokee, German, and Greek descent.

2. King’s novel The Back of the Turtle won the prestigious Governor General’s Award for English-language Fiction in 2014.

3. US journalist and activist Dorothy Day (1952) documented the word in her article “Poverty and Precarity”, written for the Catholic Workers Movement, when she quoted an anonymous Martinican priest discussing the condition of the poor. In 20th-century scholarship, the concept of precarity was understood as a feature of capitalist societies, referring to the unstable employment conditions of much of the world’s population, especially in the global south. Then, the notion of precarity appeared in academic discourse after becoming a buzzword in political mobilizations, particularly following the 2007–08 financial crisis, the Occupy and anti-austerity uprisings that took place against unemployment and social exclusion, and the 2011 Arab Spring (Kasmir 2018).

4. For further reflection on developing an awareness of an ecology of knowledges specifically in dialogue between Indigenous and settler colonial epistemologies, see Coleman (2012, 2020).

5. The corporation’s name, resembling the Latin term dominium, meaning “lordship, right of ownership”, points to the hegemony of the corporate world in our current reality. This Latin word derives from dominus (lord or master) and domus (house). Likewise, the male French name of Greek origin Dion means “child of heaven and earth”. As a metathesis, DOMI-DION signals the house of the child of heaven and earth. This is highly meaningful in the context of the novel and I wish to thank the anonymous JPW reviewer of this article for this insight.

6. This development marks the shift from the “regimes of truth”, characteristic of disciplinary societies that relied on truth by means of a “tighter functioning between media/political/education apparatuses, scientific discourses, and dominant truth-arbiters”, to “societies of control, where power exploits new ‘freedoms’ to participate/produce/express (as well as consume/diffuse/evaluate)” (Harsin 2015, 327).

7. On the novel’s balancing of western and Indigenous approaches to kinship and the ethics of care through the trope of water, see Fraile-Marcos (2019).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article has taken place within the framework of the research project “Narratives of Resilience: Intersectional Perspectives about Literature and Other Contemporary Cultural Representations” (FFI2015-63895-C2-2-R), graciously funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.

Notes on contributors

Ana María Fraile-Marcos

Ana María Fraile-Marcos is associate professor at the University of Salamanca, Spain, where she teaches English Canadian and postcolonial literatures. Her publications include Glocal Narratives of Resilience (ed., 2020), Literature and the Glocal City: Reshaping the English Canadian Imaginary (ed., 2014), Richard Wright’s Native Son (ed., 2007), the monograph Planteamientos estéticos y políticos en la obra de Zora Neale Hurston (The aesthetic and political underpinnings of Zora Neale Hurston’s work [2003]), and numerous chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals on the interconnections between resilience and gender, racialization, diaspora, and humanitarianism (among others). She is the principal investigator of the research project “Narratives of Resilience: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literature and Other Cultural Representations”.