Chapter 3 deals with what we could name as the politics of not-knowing in academia and in relation to the arts of the African diaspora. Here, we move the discussion from the conceptual implications of not-knowing to the expressive narratives of the historically silenced voices coming from the Black Atlantic and their negated spaces. Our focus is on the artistic development of Afrofuturism as a creative process to think about the impossible in fiction and the projection of an alternative future for humanity. The discussion centers on the utopia developed in Afrofuturism in the United States and its genre derivations within the African diaspora. Here, not-knowing has to do with an engagement with alternative futures coming from the Black Atlantic in a way that challenges colonialism and hegemonic academic and artistic discourses, creatively reconfiguring the shared trauma of slavery, discrimination, and racism.

In providing an overview of the state of the discipline, this chapter introduces the Handbook not as a comprehensive inventory of the anthropology of death but as a mesh of cross-cutting inquiries into the subject matter. We begin by sketching some of the field’s touchstones and how they’ve been reimagined and reengaged with in recent years. We set forth our vision as to how this compilation of scholarship adds to the discipline’s intellectual remit and how it wrestles with broader movements and preoccupations that extend beyond the object (death) itself. The diverse contexts of being with the dead explored throughout the chapters illustrate how living with the dead and dying among the living are processes nested within and in dynamic interplay with ethical, political, economic, ontological, and epistemological arenas. This analytical focus on being with the dead, we argue, foregrounds relationships and draws together scholarship often positioned outside the traditional ambit of the anthropology of death. Finally, we contextualize this editorial effort, reflecting on the exceptional conditions of death, namely a global pandemic, that shaped both the course of the collection and the subject of so many of its contributions.

This chapter examines the intersections between Indigeneity, Indigenization and CRT as paths to uncover structural racism and inequities, to resist and neutralize decolonizing ways. Indigeneity and Indigenization are grounded in radical remembering and reconceptualizing social work’s ethical and moral fortitude. They represent Indigenous identities, lifeways and values calling on us to examine all aspects of racism, power distribution, and wellbeing with the intent of strengthening communities. The dualism of CRT, white vs. black and other people of color, neglects Indigenous world views and perpetuates colonial dynamics by excluding ways of being and thinking beyond race. In this way, CRT detracts energy from restoration, securing of ancestral lands, revitalizing Indigenous languages and cultural practices, and impedes intergenerational healing. Indigenously defined social work practice holds the promise of universal wellbeing and opportunities to diversify a socially just agenda.

This chapter introduces an oceanic-vertical perspective on Asia’s Anthropocene, focusing downward from offshore oil platforms to oil fields beneath the seabed. It emphasizes the overlooked role of marine regions in Asia’s contribution to global carbon emissions. It highlights how Asian political elites, particularly after decolonization, played a central role in developing offshore oil fields, synchronizing terrestrial and oceanic energy transitions by the mid-twentieth century. Unlike land-based infrastructures constrained by colonial legacies, marine regions offered greater autonomy, allowing Asian political elites to assert judicial control. The chapter spans from the 1880s to the 1970s, tracing offshore oil’s rise first across Japanese and US waters, later followed by various Asian marine regions. It argues for recognizing Asia’s marine regions as critical sites of environmental transformation and Asian political agency. By foregrounding offshore fossil fuel development, the chapter reframes the Asian Anthropocene within global histories of energy, development, and technology—beyond terrestrial confines and explanations focused on Western colonial and capitalist elites.

The determination with which Indigenous peoples aim at protecting their traditional territories from environmental degradation emanates from their deepest spirituality and religious beliefs. The most effective means they have to avoid the deterioration of Indigenous territories is traditional ecological knowledge, which has already been recognized as critical in the combat against the environmental crisis. This traditional knowledge is an inextricable, constituent part not only of these peoples’ right to a healthy environment, but also of their right to freedom of religion or belief, all of which shows how in Indigenous worldviews traditional practices and knowledge systems are intertwined with belief systems. In spite of this, there is a worrying lack of understanding and operationalization of these peoples’ freedom of religion or belief, which hinders, in turn, the full realization of their environmental rights. With that in mind, and through an inductive approach, this chapter aims at exploring this connection while assessing the threats Indigenous religious identities and cultural survival are currently exposed to as a consequence of environmental degradation, so as to provide critical guidelines on the way forward, which must necessarily build on securing the full and effective participation of Indigenous peoples in environmental action and policy-making.

The chapter responds to movements in international human rights law to articulate Indigenous rights to the environment. Specifically, the chapter draws upon critical Indigenous literature to identify Indigenous concerns regarding international human rights approaches. The analysis provides a brief background on prevailing international law approaches to Indigenous environmental rights, along with an overview of Indigenous critiques of international law for Indigenous peoples. The chapter extends the analysis to international human rights. The analysis reviews of jurisprudence in international law that extends international human rights to protect Indigenous rights to the environment. The analysis follows such review with a critique drawn from the commentaries of Indigenous scholars who view the existing international human rights system as being problematic for Indigenous peoples. The analysis finds that while international human rights law presents potential opportunities to protect Indigenous rights to environment, Indigenous critics still see human rights approaches as being problematic for Indigenous peoples.

This chapter is on the triangular relation between romance, tragedy, and decolonization as both themes and tropes in African fiction. The primary concern in the chapter is the work of the novel in the late colonial period and first decade of independence in Africa when the genre was tied closely to the politics of cultural nationalism. A key premise in the chapter is that the turn to the novel among African elites was bifurcated. On one hand, the genre attracted African elites in the late colonial period because they assumed that the genre would best register the tragedy of colonization, notably its cultural deracination, its destruction of subjects, and its denial of African agency. On the other hand, the novel was often asked to help African subjects imagine a future beyond colonialism. The novel in Africa came to be structured by the need to develop a language in which the tragedy that was seen as a defining characteristic of colonial history and the lived experience of colonized subjects, would be countered by the romance of a future that the novel as a genre was imagining and willing into being.

Even when they were produced within colonial systems or in the crucible of cultural nationalism, African literature and art in the twentieth century were inseparable from global cultural movements most notably modernism. Nevertheless, for reasons discussed in this chapter, the idea of a modern or contemporary art in Africa has often been resisted by Euro-American (and even African) critics and the institutions of art and literary criticism, which have historically located African creativity in a premodern realm. This chapter is a critique of this location of African art outside the epistemologies and forms of modernism. Originating as a comprehensive review of “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994,” a landmark exhibition of African art curated by Okui Enwezor in 2002, this chapter seeks to go beyond the denial of the modernism of African art and, through a close examination of Enwezor’s project, identifies the modernist aesthetic as a dynamic form that was indispensable to the African imagination in the twentieth century.

For most of its history in the twentieth century African literature has been haunted by the question of modernity. This chapter presents modernity as the overdetermining condition of literature in both colonialism and postcolonial society, examines how modernity came to exert its influence in the institution of African literature by hiding behind the mask of tradition, and treats modernity as both the cause and a symptom of the crisis associated with decolonial projects. This chapter is on the strategies developed by African writers to narrate this crisis: What does it mean to consider modernity as the overdetermining condition of African literature when the original impetus for this tradition of writing was the recuperation of precolonial histories and experiences? The chapter pays particular attention to the variety of forms in which the figure of the modern was represented in works that were not explicitly about modernity, most prominently Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, and Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine. These are novels where the referents are obviously precolonial while the ideas and the forms are about the nature and meaning of the modern.

This chapter is on novelistic discourses and the project of cultural translation in African literature from the perspective of Comparative Literature. The chapter begins with an analysis of debates on translation from both a linguistic and cultural perspective focusing on how, in comparative literature, debates about translation are caught in a conceptual impasse between critics who insist on the impossibility of translation and those who claim that nothing is untranslatable. The key argument in this chapter is that African literature in European languages complicates this division by calling into question the notion of an original or source language. In African fiction produced in the twentieth century, what appeared to be the source language was already a translation. More significantly, linguistic translation could not be separated from the project of cultural translation; in order for novels to perform significant cultural work, writers had to make African idioms and speech forms intelligible to outsiders without reaffirming the forms of colonial knowledge.

The transformations of the modern era have led to today’s vast social divisions between wealth and poverty, but also created a human community that is interconnected on a global scale, processes that are examined in this chapter. Major economic and political changes, such as industrialization and de-industrialization, imperialism and anti-imperialism, the rise and collapse of communism, and the expansion of nationalism, have intersected with social and cultural changes within a framework of rapidly increasing population and human impact on the environment. International movements for social justice have called for greater egalitarianism and understanding, while ethnic, religious, and social divisions have led to brutality, genocides, and war. Technological developments in agriculture, medicine, and weaponry have both extended human life and extinguished it at levels unimagined in earlier eras, simultaneously challenging and reinforcing long-standing social hierarchies and cultural patterns.

In foundational African narratives, time, decolonization, and modernity are bound together. This chapter looks at how, at its moment of emergence in the second half of the twentieth century, modern African fiction, whose aim was to rationalize African notions of time and account for both colonial history and what appeared to be failing projects of decolonization, was motivated by the desire to account for a temporal impasse: the fact that the old colonial order had disappeared but the future promised by the political class was yet to come. This temporal impasse explains the confluence of realism and modernism in postcolonial African fiction. In their themes, forms, and tone, the novels published in the 1960s set out to negotiate the empty space of a stalled decoloniality. Using Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God as a case study, the chapter reflects on the novel as a mode of mediating historical time conceived as both past and present, simultaneously preoccupied with the teleology of the temporality ushered in by colonialism even after decolonization.