Postcolonial Entanglements: Unruling Stories

Abstract

In this article, I use Donna Haraway's philosophy to think about postcolonial encounters between different species. I follow entangled stories of the deer/settler-child figure to trouble colonialisms and untangle the histories and trajectories that we inhabit with other species through colonial histories. I shy away from generalizations and instead grapple with complexities that ordinary stories bring as I attempt to engage in nonhegemonic versions of childhood studies.

KEYWORDS:

• childhood
• cross-species encounters
• pedagogy
• postcolonial

Acknowledgments

This article emerged from my readings of Donna Haraway and, importantly, from my many long conversations with graduate students Denise Hodgins, Fikile Nxumalo, Kathleen Kummen, Deborah Thompson, Scott Kouri, Vanessa Clark, and Carol Rowan.

Notes

The term “settler” refers to, as Deborah Bird Rose (2004) notes, “the conquerors and their descendants” (p. 2). It implies invasion or occupation of lands where people were already residing; in particular, it refers to settler colonialism and European colonial expansion.

Levinas's (1969) ethics of face-to-face relations makes us answerable to the call of the other: “In the face-to-face relationship the individual experiences being obligated before the Other, and is called to response and responsibility in relating to the person who is other than himself or herself” (Cook & Young, 2004, p. 343). I argue that this ethics can be extended to human-nonhuman relations (see Rose, 2004).

My use of the term “postcolonial state,” both here and throughout, does not denote the end of colonization. I use the term to be attentive to colonized, racialized, and gendered histories entwined with state formation (see Jiwani, 2006; Razack, Smith, & Thobani, 2010).

Haraway (1997) uses figures as reclamations that have “real” meanings, a kind of personification and, simultaneously, a making of knowledge. Figures are not about representations or significations, but they can be inhabited “to map universes of knowledge, practice and power” (p. 11). Figures, Haraway (1997) says, “involve at least some kind of displacement that can trouble identifications and certainties”; they “can be condensed maps of contestable worlds” (p. 11). Claudia Casteneda (2002) writes: This concept of figuration makes it possible to describe in detail the process by which a concept or entity is given a particular form—how it is figured—in ways that speak to the making of worlds. To use figuration as a descriptive tool [not as representation] is to unpack the domains of practice and significance that are built into each figure. A figure, from this point of view, is the simultaneously material and semiotic effect of specific practices. Understood as figures, furthermore, particular categories of existence can also be considered terms of their uses—what they “body forth” in turn. Figuration is thus understood here to incorporate a double force: constitutive effect and generative circulation. (p. 3)