Waste Ecologies and Decoloniality in the Tropical Futurisms of Shiv Ramdas’s Domechild (2013)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.24.1.2025.4178Keywords:
tropical futurisms, Indian Speculative Fiction, discard ecologies, Domechild, Wasteocene, decolonialityAbstract
This article engages in a decolonial reading of Shiv Ramdas’s Domechild (2013), delving into how the novel constructs futurisms to dismantle Western structures of dominance and control. It explicates tropical futurisms as orienting components that alert readers to disrupt epistemic singularity and imperial hegemony by insisting upon pluralized possible futures. Domechild fictionalizes a bifurcated world—City and Sanctuary—that interrogates the socio-material practices of waste(ing) as enduring legacies of colonialism. This study argues that Ramdas’s meta-theoretical speculative fiction probes discard ecologies by instituting waste as both ecosophical matter and an agential force against the ramifications of colonial-capitalist epistemologies. In this regard, Marco Armiero’s (2021) Wasteocene is explored by reimagining the structural interplay of capitalism, technology, and the enduring colonial legacies of binomial dispossession and systemic inequality in tropical regions. The following analysis serves as a dialogue between Ramdas’s narrative fiction and decolonial theory, reifying the necessity of epistemic disobedience.
References
Armiero, M. (2021). Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump. Cambridge. University Printing House.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.
Bell, L. (2018). Place, people and processes in waste theory: a global South critique. Cultural Studies, 33 (1), 98-121. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2017.1420810
Benitez, C.J.R., & Lundberg, A. (2022). Tropical Materialisms: Toward Decolonial Poetics, Practices and Possibilities. eTropic: electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 21(2), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.21.2.2022.3929
Bennett, J. (2001). The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics. Princeton University Press.
Butler, J. (2009). Performativity, precarity and sexual politics. Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, 4 (3), i–xiii. https://doi.org/10.11156/aibr.040303e
Cera, A. (2017). The Technocene or Technology as (Neo)environment. Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 21 (2-3), 243-281. https://doi.org/10.5840/techne201710472
Chakrabarty, D. (2009). The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry, 35, 197-222. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/596640
Chattopadhyay, B. (2017). Kalpavigyan and Imperial Technoscience: Three Nodes of an Argument. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 28(1), 102-122.
Chattopadhyay, B. (2021). Manifestos of Futurisms. Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 50 (2).
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2000). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane (Trans). University of Minnesota Press.
Deranty, J.P. (2021). Post-work society as an oxymoron: Why we cannot, and should not, wish work away. European Journal of Social Theory, 25 (3). https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310211012169
Edensor, T. (2005). Waste matter — The Debris of Industrial Ruins and the Disordering of the Material World. Journal of Material Culture, 10 (3), 311-332. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183505057346
Fraser, N. (2022). Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do about It. Verso.
Granter, E., & Aroles, J. (2023). Crisis and Utopia: André Gorz and the end of work. Journal of Classical Sociology, 23 (2), 211-228. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X231170368
Gupta, K., & Thakur, R. (2024). Desert(ed) nuclear scapes: a geontological reading of Uday Singh’s Pokhran: a novel. cultural geographies, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740241293099
Han, B.C. (2015). The Burnout Society. (E. Butler, Trans). Stanford University Press.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble. In J. W. Moore (Ed.), Anthropocene or capitalocene? (pp. 34– 76). PM Press.
Hoelle, J., & Kawa, N. C. (2021). Placing the Anthropos in Anthropocene. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111 (3), 655-662. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1842171
Indigenous Action. (2020). Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto. https://www.indigenousaction.org/rethinking-the-apocalypse-an-indigenous-anti-futurist-manifesto/
Karmakar, G., & Chetty, R. (2023a). Extraction and Environmental Injustices: (De)colonial Practices in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were. eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 22(2), 125-147. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.22.2.2023.3970
Karmakar, G., & Chetty, R. (2023b). Cognitive (In)justice and Decoloniality in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse. Journal of Human Values, 30(2), 119-133. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09716858231185614
Karmakar, G., & Bryne, C.D. (2024). “Knowledge Born in the Struggle”: Activism, Decolonial Ecology, and Sustainability in Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed: A Memoir. Scrutiny 2, 0-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/18125441.2024.2391414
Kim, H. Living as waste-bodies in a dump: feral sociality and ecofeminist education of ecotone. Gender and Education, 36 (4), 312-327. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2023.2284792
Liboiron, M., & Lepawsky, J. (2022). Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power. The MIT Press.
Muñoz Martínez, Y. (2022). Gardening in Polluted Tropics: The Materiality of Waste and Toxicity in Olive Senior’s Caribbean Poetry. eTropic: electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 21(2), 162-179. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.21.2.2022.3907
Mitchell, A., & Chaudhury, A. (2020). Worlding beyond ‘the’ ‘end’ of ‘the world’: white apocalyptic visions and BIPOC futurisms. International Relations, 34(3), 309-332. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0047117820948936
Moore, J. W. (2016). The Rise of Cheap Nature. In J. W. Moore (Eds.), Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. PM Press.
Moore, J. W. (2017). The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44 (3), 594-630. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036
Mussgnug, F. (2018). Rome in Ruins Revisited: Mario Soldati’s The Emerald and Catastrophic Futurism. In L. Caldwell, & F. Camilletti (Eds.), Rome (pp. 37-52). Modern Humanities Research Association: Legenda.
Ramdas, S. (2013). Domechild. Penguin Random House.
Román, Á. S., & Molinero-Gerbeau, Y. (2023). Anthropocene, Capitalocene or Westernocene? On the Ideological Foundations of the Current Climate Crisis. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 34 (4), 39-57. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2023.2189131
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 CC-BY
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who submit articles to this journal agree to the following terms:
1. Authors are responsible for ensuring that any material that has influenced the research or writing has been properly cited and credited both in the text and in the Reference List (Bibliography). Contributors are responsible for gaining copyright clearance on figures, photographs or lengthy quotes used in their manuscript that have been published elsewhere.
2. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License that allows others to share and adapt the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository, or publish it in a book), with proper acknowledgement of the work's initial publication in this journal.
4. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (see The Effect of Open Access or The Open Access Citation Advantage). Where authors include such a work in an institutional repository or on their website (i.e., a copy of a work which has been published in eTropic, or a pre-print or post-print version of that work), we request that they include a statement that acknowledges the eTropic publication including the name of the journal, the volume number and a web-link to the journal item.
5. Authors should be aware that the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License permits readers to share (copy and redistribute the work in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the work) for any purpose, even commercially, provided they also give appropriate credit to the work, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do these things in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests you or your publisher endorses their use.