Speculative Ecopoetics on ‘The Human’: With Suzanne Césaire, Édouard Glissant, and Audre Lorde

Abstract

Caribbean thinkers Suzanne Césaire and Édouard Glissant introduce their readers to more-than-human figures – the plant-human and beach walker respectively – that theorize new ways of being. Accompanied by an epistemological shift, the figures disrupt Western colonial binaries and render them inoperative. This paper argues via Audre Lorde’s work that we can understand these speculations on ‘the human’ as a double move of creating one’s being and a new (self-)understanding thereof. The result is an aesthetic strategy that enables experimentation with the category of the human, surpassing reductive universals.