Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: Many scholars, analysts and commentators have noted that the neoliberal conjuncture has seen the rise of a veritable explosion of discourses and theories of resilience. Some regard this discursive and narrative profusion as integral to the ongoing project of a neoliberal ‘worlding’ that seeks to reconfigure all aspects of human subjectivities and social relations. Meanwhile, the ongoing outpouring of neoliberal discourses and narratives of resilience is accompanied by the expansion of disasterscapes across the planet as we speed apparently toward what the Caribbean scholar Sylvia Wynter calls an ‘unparalleled catastrophe for our species’. Some of these expanding disasterscapes are emerging across the terrain of a five-hundred-year history of genocidal and appropriative colonial practices. The people and communities inhabiting these disasterscapes have been struggling to develop counter-praxes of collective cultural resilience and survival in the face of the many catastrophes wrought over the centuries by coloniality. We turn to Wynter’s concept of homo narrans to examine Indigenous praxes for the performative enactment of alternative genres of the human that contest the worlding of neoliberal discourses and apparatuses of resilience. Wynter’s contributions to the de-universalization and thus relativization of Eurocentric ‘Man’ aim to make the present proliferation of the genres of humanity, our storytelling species, culturally intelligible in ways that might not only undercut the work done by neoliberal discourses of resilience toward the production of disastrous consequences in places like Guatemala and the obliteration of our capacities to imagine the world otherwise, but perhaps even ward off the potentially impending ‘unparalleled catastrophe for our species’. This paper draws on our ongoing research in Guatemala, which involves Indigenous and poor ladino survivors of the 2018 eruption of the Fuego Volcano, as well as survivors of the 2005 landslide that followed Hurricane Stan.
Source: Cultural Studies
Authors: Kevin Glynn, Julie Cupples
Institutions: Northumbria University, University of Edinburgh
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funders: Research Center for Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Consejo de Desarrollo Científico y Humanístico, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Natural Environment Research Council, Natural Science Foundation of Tianjin Municipal Science and Technology Commission, FP7 Environment
Awards: Communication with Hazard Maps in Central America: A multidisciplinary science-media-community network (HazMap_CA), Dynamic Risk at Fuego Volcano: Communities living in a post-eruption but still persistently active context., G4737353030, Ixchel: Building understanding of the physical, cultural and socio-economic drivers of risk for strengthening resilience in the Guatemalan cordillera, G82946908, G8589252916
OpenAlex ID: W4309012473