Abstract:

My paper begins with a provocation – industrialized humanity increasingly acts in its own self-interest as a species apart, while producing the very conditions of planetary despoliation in which a trans-species environmental commons has become urgent. My paper argues for a decolonizing, democratic engagement with environmental knowledges formed outside the academy in the Global South. Drawing upon Bruno Latour’s claim that contemporary environmental precarity was first trialled upon colonized peoples, I argue that historically-remote and conceptually intricate indigenous popular knowledges must be treated as complex, contemporary forms of theory in their own right. Accordingly, I argue that indigenous multi-species shape-shifting in the 19th century Bleek-Lloyd archive pioneers a radical African environmentalism, in which both human and non-human forms, not all of them “alive,” have stakes in human activity and in bringing the world (back) to life.

My retranslation of the indigenous song, 'The Broken String,’ shows that the extinct 19th century Southern African /Xam language engineered shape-shifting techniques and linguistic protocols for securing food and water. Specifically, /Xam was a template for transmutation – a language that instructed polyvalent conversions between species and lifespans. These versatile changes were geared towards the community’s survival of catastrophic environmental change. Faced with their own colonial disposability, the /Xam opted to metamorphose and live on. Accordingly, /Xam’s ‘magical’ metamorphoses were straightforward strategic gambles with life and death amid scant survival options.

As historical, provincial forerunners of our own precarious global moment, the /Xam prompt us to identify ‘polymorphously’ with our object-world and to allow other life-presences to occupy us. Thus, /Xam’s shape-shifting poetics might lead us to derive replenishing registers of address for our world. Furthermore, institutionalising new protocols of embodiment, as the /Xam once did, might order our urgent task of replenishing our planet, by allowing environmental political interest and global species’ behaviours to iterate themselves through us. In this way, we might transform our own models of self and instead derive a new environmentalist project, in which non-human and even non-sentient actors express a political stake.

Bio: Brendon Nicholls is Associate Professor of Postcolonial African Studies (University of Leeds). Nicholls is author of a monograph, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading, and an edited collection on Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People. His articles appear in Modern Fiction Studies, Research in African Literatures, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, African Identities, Cultural Critique and New Formations. Nicholls holds the 2022 Hugh Le May Fellowship at Rhodes University.

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