Contesting Extinctions

This dynamic book is an exciting and timely contribution to urgent conversations in the environmental humanities and postcolonial and ethnic studies about extinction. Rather than consider extinction as a singular or future event, this interdisciplinary collection explores temporally expansive settler-colonial extinctions in the plural. Foregrounding Indigenous, Black, and decolonial responses, the contributors trace a praxis of contestation to capital's eradicating drive that is rooted in critical relationality.

This volume is a crucial addition to the growing field of extinction studies. The editors and contributors elucidate how contesting extinction means careful attention to both loss and revitalization: It means finding new ways to write about animals, plants, waters, and places; it means dismantling settler colonialism and contributing to Indigenous resurgences; it means practicing new ways of grieving and loving together in a non-extractivist manner. These are powerful essays against erasure and towards regenerative biocultural futures.

When the biomass associated with humans threatens to surpass that of all other living biomass on the planet, observant people know that humankind has fulfilled the biblical command to multiply and subdue Earth. With the exception of a few pests that consume food supplies (e.g., locusts), the human race has poisoned many insects nearly out of existence, some, such as honeybees, essential to human survival. In this anthology, six essays from the related conference dissect various existing and anticipated outcomes of human influence while also contesting the allegedly capitalistic premise underlying the term Anthropocene.... The book is mainly about historical or anticipated extinction of indigenous peoples and languages--events not to be ignored, of course. The text does a good job of documenting these. [A]ppropriate for use as a supplementary text. Recommended... Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students.