ABSTRACT The introduction to this Symposium outlines how actually existing movements contest various forms of “colonial Natures,” from settler property regimes to extractive frontiers and conservation landscapes. The authors of the six papers highlight the situated praxis of grassroots communities and organic intellectuals in Bolivia, India, Iran, Paraguay, Tanzania, and the United States, and show how they resist, reshape, and strategically engage colonial and capitalist logics of nature in defense of their own ontologies and life projects. Contributors emphasize how decolonizing struggles are contingent, ongoing, and full of compromise, conflict, and “making do.” Informed by the communities they are in conversation with, the editors of this collection and the authors of the papers build on diverse and entangled genealogies of anti‐colonial and postcolonial thought to further debates and actions to decolonize Nature, territory, land, and politics. We hold material and epistemic approaches to anti‐colonial thought in productive tension and mobilize feminist and other critical methodologies to parse the ambivalences of representation, responsibility, and the ethics of locating ourselves as scholars and allies in anti‐ and de‐colonial debates and in the political economy of knowledge production. In doing so, we critically question key terms (Nature, gender, land, indigeneity, territory, property, decolonization, and more) of knowledge production, politics, and contestation.
Anthias et al. (Sun,) studied this question.