Storytelling Earth and Body

According to Sylvia Wynter, we are “a storytelling species”: The capacity to narrate the world might be what we hold most in common as “humans” across diverse geographies. In this article, we weave together Black, Indigenous, and third world and women of color feminist scholarship to ask this question: How can storytelling, as an alternate mode of theorization, help us resituate contemporary planetary crises within longer histories and plural understandings of our relations with earth? We closely read three anticolonial (feminist) scholars whose theories illuminate the relationship of race, gender, and nature: Wynter’s genealogy of humans as storytellers; Lorena Cabnal’s elaboration of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) and ancestral patriarchy; and Mishuana Goeman’s conceptualization of the body as a meeting place. Anticolonial feminist storytelling alters the spatiotemporal scales through which planetary crises are understood by centering the relationship between body and land. We elaborate how the White, cis male, bourgeois and propertied figure of the human reproduces a story that normalizes the racialization of people and ecologies, gendered domination, and extractivism. Revealing this dominant story to be a fiction of modernity, these scholars open a space of possibility, to tell stories otherwise that reimagine what it means to be human on earth. Storytelling as anticolonial praxis troubles the fixity of racial-colonial violence and reconceives the human, not as a liberal subject or fixed object within colonial capitalism, but as a node within a relational network of human and nonhuman kin.