Decolonial Myths and Demi-gods of the Tropics
The More-than-Human Worlds of Manasa and Olokun
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5769719 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sunu Rose Joseph (0000-0002-6930-1018, National Institute of Technology Karnataka), Shashikantha Koudur (0000-0002-3231-4149, National Institute of Technology Karnataka) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 155-174 |
| Publication date | 2023-07-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | eTropic electronic journal of studies in the tropics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1448-2940 • E-ISSN: 1448-2940 |
| Publisher | James Cook University (PUBLISHER • AU) |
| DOI | 10.25120/etropic.22.1.2023.3980 |
| OpenAlex | W4382931255 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 27 |
In response to the current age of the Anthropocene, Posthumanist studies explore multispecies' entanglements and encounters in order to move away from the colonial binaries that separate humans from the environment. Adding to these studies, this paper explores the role of mythology in decolonising the Westerncentric strategies of narration. Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island and Rita Indiana's Tentacle, envision the relationship of the human with other species against the deepening climate crisis, bringing to the fore the often-discounted discourses of cultural myths. In Gun Island, Manasa, the quintessential nagini is a folk deity of fear-based Nature worship from the Bay of Bengal, and an outsider to the established pantheon of Hindu gods. The Yoruba deity, Olokun, and his/her incarnations, move across the three time periods in Tentacle emerging as the saviour of the Caribbean islands. The novels reinterpret and re-evaluate the tropical Indigenous myths to implement alternate approaches of knowing and being in the world. This article seeks to explore how posthumanist and decolonial perspectives in these mythologies create new alliances that stretch across space, time, and species, symbolising the relationality of all life. The paper delves into the power of the mythical deities to highlight the existence of an interconnected network of human and more-than-human realms
Anthropocene · Yoruba · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions
Depoliticized Environments
“The One Who Comes from the Sea”
The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout
The Goddess Re-discovered
How Forests Think
Submerged Bodies
Gothic "Voodoo" in Africa and Haiti
Post-Quantal Garden” Annotated
History, Fable and Myth in The Caribbean and Guianas
Where the Wild Things Are Now
The Triumph of the Snake Goddess
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Term Anthropocene
Decolonising Climate Change
Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option
Tropical Landscapes and Nature-Culture Entanglements
(Re)encountering monsters
The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative
Scholastic fallacies? Questioning the Anthropocene
Decolonizing political ecology
A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities
Posthuman, All Too Human
The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |