Worlds Beyond Bios builds on recent theoretical and ethnographic approaches to the more-than-human, exploring how entities not traditionally recognized as “alive” play active roles in shaping multispecies worlds. Drawing from Indigenous and Global South epistemologies as well as anthropology, the environmental humanities, and political theory, the contributors develop philosophies and practices of engagement with matter that are agentive and affective. Taken together, they offer ways of theorizing relations, justice, and materiality in an age of planetary unmaking and colonial capitalist logics, grounded in an ethics of responsibility and repair. From the political agency of mountains and the liveliness of sand to the spectral futures of coal and the opaque aesthetics of dust, Worlds Beyond Bios reveals how assumed borders between bios and non-bios are not only porous but politically consequential.
Foreword / Elizabeth Povinelli ix
Thinking Beyond Bios in an Age of Planetary Undoing / Sophie Chao 1
Part I: Eco-Materialities
1. Chanting the Waters / Craig Santos Perez 27
2. The Power of Mountains / GastÓn Gordillo 30
3. Sand as Subject of Multispecies Justice / Christine Winter 46
4. Toward a Geological Humanism? / Erin Fitz-Henry 59
5. Climatic Corporeality / Blanche Verlie 78
6. Five Eco-Material Connections / Natasha Fijn 98
Part II: Techn-Materialities
7. Kotu Batu / Eunice Andrada 121
8. Minding the Ropes / CÉsar Enrique Giraldo Herrera 122
9. Waste and the City / Elizabeth Duncan 131
10. What Matter Matters / David Schlosberg and Christine Winter 147
11. Water and Soil Relationality / Giulia Lepori 157
Part III. Cosmo-Materialities
12. Poem of the Dead Woman / Judith Nangala Crispin 173
13. Making Works with Mermaids / Jelle J. P. Wouters 176
14. Strange Lights, New Skies / Yasmine Musharbash / 197
15. Corazonando from the Amazon / Jenny GarcÍa Ruales 209
16. Omenic Missiles, Cold War Specters / Zsuzsanna Ihar 235
Part IV: Material Afterlives
17. A Body Emptied—Full / Jamie Wang 255
18. Ways to Love Sludge / Faizah Zakaria 261
19. Multibeing Drag Rift / Susan Reid and Astrida Neimanis 280
20. Frontiers of Dust / Malini Sur 288
21. Pulp Frictions / Karin Bolender 299
22. After Coal / Ute Eickelkamp 315
23. Spent Earth / Sophie Chao 340
Afterword / Makere Stewart-Harawira 351
Acknowledgments 355
Bibliography 357
Contributors 405
Index 411
