Presentation short abstract

We focus on diverse worlds around rainwater built through resistance and care practiced by Indigenous and artisanal communities. We trace community struggles for survival and flourishing so that colonially damaged materialities of rainwater may (re)gain their place as cornerstones of sustainability.

Presentation long abstract

“When will we again see a spring of unstained green?

After how many monsoons will the blood be washed from the branches?”

Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1974, trans. Aga Shahid Ali)

Political ecologists have developed many concepts to scrutinise the materiality of violence including structural and slow violence, violent environments, and violent transitions. However, such concepts are limited in capturing the cumulative impact of extreme violence of colonial genocides of the last five centuries. More expansive concepts such as racial capitalism and settler colonialism, often neglect how extreme violence constitutes distinctive socio-ecological materialities of the modern world. To highlight those materialities, we use the concept of colonial modernity developed by postcolonial and decolonial scholars to describe material cultures enacted through European colonialisms in the Majority world.

Colonial modernity is globally hegemonic today. It has been built and extended through the devastation of culture-natures or worlds that constitute diverse Indigenous and artisanal ways of being, knowing and making that have been thus curtailed beyond recognition. Focusing on specific rain worlds and associated ways of being-knowing-making with rainwater, we trace their devastation by the growth of the modern world in two regions: Palestine and South India. Our main aim, however, is to go beyond colonial devastation and provide an overview of what survives or thrives in diverse rain worlds through resistance, endurance and care practiced by affected communities. It is through extensive struggles for survival and flourishing that colonially damaged materialities of rainwater may (re)gain their place as cornerstones of decolonial sustainability.