This field review provides a critical interpretation of Vivek Chibber’s generative polemic, Postcolonial Studies and the Specter of Capitalism.1 Situating Chibber’s work within a long history of Marxist critiques of postcolonial theory, as well as within an even longer interdisciplinary debate over method catalyzed but not caused by poststructuralist thought, this review argues that Chibber fails to articulate an adequately materialist account of capitalism in the colonial and postcolonial world. It then examines recent initiates of scholars of postcolonial studies to develop materialist methodologies in the wake of poststructuralism’s disciplinary hegemony.

This article proposes the concept of noncapitalist wealth as a line of inquiry into the relations among capitalism, animism, and literary production. I begin by discussing the methodological implications of Harry Garuba’s influential essay on “animist materialism” and suggest that Garuba’s operating theory of capital means that his method ultimately leads to a mode of reading that understands animism as bearing primarily upon representation rather than on literary production. The result is a mode of reading that lacks sensitivity to the implications of the influence of specific animisms on individual texts. Eschewing an encompassing theory of animism’s relation to literary production, I propose the concept of noncapitalist wealth, derived in part from Karl Marx and anthropologists such as Jane I. Guyer, as a potential avenue of inquiry within the debate around literary animisms. I offer a reading of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road trilogy (1990–1998) to demonstrate the ways in which an operating concept of wealth, combined with a sensitivity to contemporary forms of capitalism, can help to reveal the political dimension of some literary texts.

This article forms a response to Bryan Cheyette’s essay in this journal, “Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora,” and focuses on the dialectics of comparing minority experiences in a climate of implicit and explicit violence toward minorities. Agreeing with Cheyette’s invocation of such threatening environments, I speak to what he characterizes as the importance of nonbinary thinking by gesturing to similar work unfolding in Black studies, specifically in the theorization of anti-Blackness and the work of Christina Sharpe. I end with a brief discussion of the Modern Jewish-Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel to focalize the practice of the comparative work between Jewish and postcolonial studies in threatening environments. I argue that Ezekiel’s approach highlights the “fluidity” and in-built multiplicity of such environments, and so undermines the seemingly rigidity of violent and singular binaries.

This essay responds to Bryan Cheyette’s “Against Supercessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora.”1 It argues that Cheyette fails to evade certain forms of binary thinking, in particular those that polarize thought and action, theory and praxis. We see this persistence of binary logic in his discussion of my book Multidirectional Memory and in his engagement with the critic Aamir Mufti on the topic of Israel/Palestine and the legacies of Edward Said.

This article examines Indigenous stories that reveal how the land communicates to humans through medicinal plants. The intention is to address a blind spot in new materialist theory, which Zoe Todd has criticized for its lack of attention to Indigenous forms and practices of relational materialism. The main focus of this essay is Indigenous narratives about the sacred plant sweetgrass (known as (wihkaskwa in Cree; wiingaashk in Anishinaabemowin). Reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s meditation Braiding Sweetgrass and Drew Hayden Taylor’s novel Motorcycles and Sweetgrass, and watching Jessie Short’s 2016 film Sweet Night, I argue that these artists portray sweetgrass as an intermediary between humans and the land, strengthening Indigenous cultural sovereignty and deepening human relationships by reminding people of their shared embodiment and their shared spiritual-territorial connection. The plant is revealed in these works as a teacher, operating through its scent, texture, and literal rootedness to teach humans about their own connectedness to particular living places.

By working at the level of sensation rather than linguistic signification, the sweetgrass is also shown to have an immediate and embodied effect upon the characters in these works. In particular, it offers itself as a gift, and as a conduit of love. I argue that the repeated image of the sweetgrass braid in these works is not exactly a metaphor, but is instead a profound conjoining of the earth and the human body, both submitted to the care of human hands. To braid the earth’s fragrant hair is to treat it in the most intimate way, as a family member or a beloved. It is this human activity of braiding that clarifies the kinship aspect of sweetgrass, showing us that it is not a thing, but a relation. The reciprocity of this relationship shows an Indigenous ethic of engagement with the living material world.

The essay looks at the challenges Australian Indigenous materialisms make to the Western concept of human and its relation to the inhuman, and it does this through reading the novels of Waanyi writer, critic, and activist Alexis Wright. In the Australian context, a highly productive knot is being tied between post-humanism and postcolonialism, such that the binary of “culture” and “nature” is understood in relation to another binary couple that sits snugly within “culture” and “nature,” and that is “colonizer” and “native.” The place of Indigenous-signed literary texts in critiques of Western materialisms cannot be underestimated. It is through the arts that most encounters between Indigenous and settler Australians take place. How non-Indigenous readers might approach these literary texts is a key ethical question with implications for new materialist and post-humanist projects.

This essay begins by asking whether the new materialism, as currently constituted, can say anything useful about race, given that the most widely read texts recognized as belonging to this emerging field pointedly do not. Put another way, this essay examines possibilities for the reading of the raced enfleshed human subject in and beyond the parameters of the new materialism. The essay’s first section locates the raced enfleshed subject as latent (if not actively suppressed) entity in existing new materialist work. The latter half turns to questions of possibility, especially the question of whether a much older, precluded, or occluded voice is already “speaking through” the so-called materialist turn, challenging it as a way of contesting its own (attempted, failed) erasure from the metaphysical founding scene of the liberal humanist subject that informs the material turn.

This essay studies the Granada Trilogy by Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour, a novel that tells of the growing constraints on and eventual expulsion of the Arabs during the Spanish Inquisition across five generations of an Andalusian family. In linking this story to that of the Palestinians in the twentieth century and beyond, Ashour ascertains a logic of modernity in which the longue durée governs the experience of time’s passage, and peoples disconnected by long intervals of chronological time bear an intimate affinity by virtue of their common subjugation. Far from being merely a reflection of her despondency over the inability to change this historical dynamic, the Granada Trilogy suggests that the hopefulness animating these refugees is a revolutionary resource with which to apprise present actors of the multiple possible futures that remain alive in the present.

Petroleum, a 2004 novel by Swiss-Gabonese writer Bessora, takes place almost entirely on the Ocean Liberator, a ship extracting oil off the coast of Gabon. I argue that the Ocean Liberator operates as what Marc Augé calls a non-place, a place that cannot be defined in terms of history, identity, or relations. Non-places, frequently under neither national nor international supervision, facilitate the creation of a precarious international labor force. I furthermore underline the relation among the non-place workplace, environmental degradation, and the choice of detective fiction. Petroleum is what I call a supermodern detective novel, which moves beyond local violence to deal with transnational networks of capitalist power and oppression.