Abstract

This article primarily considers the possibility of translating between Indigenous and settler modes of ecological thought and praxis. The former often manifest analogously to quantum field theory, where, as Indigene Linda Yarrowin states, “it's all connected,” while the latter depend on the Newtonian logic of the void to create simplified universal models. The author first provides green governance examples of these differences from Australia's Northern Territories and Xinjiang Uyghur Region, adopting Karen Barad's agential realism to distinguish among modes of thought. Next is an analysis of Taiwanese novelist Wu Ming-yi's attempt to engage these cosmologies in his acclaimed “ecocosmopolitan” novel The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011), assessing the viability of “patchy Anthropocene” as a means of translating, or making visible, ecologies occluded by Newtonian void logic. The author argues that Wu's novel succeeds in this endeavor by depicting local and global processes of settler-colonial decolonization and indicting epistemologies of “radioactive racism” that view Pacific islands as “empty” of life, logics that rationalized US Cold War nuclear tests and radiation experiments on Marshall Island Indigenes.

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