Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World by Anne Stewart (review)

Reviewed by: Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third Worldby Anne Stewart Alison Sperling Narrative and/as Land. Anne Stewart. Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World. U of Minnesota P, 2022. 279 pp. $104 hc, $26 pbk & ebk. The earthis the ontological framework for decolonization, Anne Stewart asserts in her impressive interdisciplinary, land-based literary study Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World. The book is groundbreaking as it invests in the study of literary grounds breaking, terrestrial disturbances, and "shattered grounded normativity" (following Glen Sean Coulthard) embedded, etched, indeed terraformed not only onto the earth's surface, but also into what Stewart informally names terrestrial media or terrestrial grammar as decolonizing narrativeforces. The book reads "a seismic tremor, a crumbling coastline, or a catastrophic storm" (4) alongside descriptions of infrastructural, social-systemic failures and Black and Indigenous-led activist uprisings that demonstrate an ontologically grounded mode pervading US literary production following the Cold War, crucially predating the current wave of so-called Anthropocene fiction and contemporary ecocritical theory. The book is far-reaching in its important interventions into literary criticism and especially ecocriticism, genre and narrative studies, Indigenous studies, multiethnic studies, and cultural studies more broadly. Angry Planetbegins by relaying "Messages from the Angry Planet"—the title of Stewart's introduction—setting out an expansive argument about the chapters' foci on "narrative act[s] of claiming ontological authority" (25); she finds roots largely in texts from the 1970s. Angry Planetis, overall, a project indebted to an enormous wealth of Indigenous, Latinx, Chicanx, and Black studies scholarship from the 1970s to the contemporary moment. Stewart navigates this material adeptly and powerfully, drawing out lineages for reading "angry planet fiction" that have long undergirded current ecocritical and Indigenous ontological frameworks. Claims to land are essential to Indigenous knowledge production, so much so that "By far the largest attack on Indigenous Knowledge systems right now is land dispossession" (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, qtd. in Stewart 9). The title concept of the "American third world" is used with "deliberate ironic force," and follows in large part from Sylvia Wynter's concept of the "archipelago of Human Otherness" ("Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, its Overrepresentation—an Argument" [2003]) and from George Manuel and Michael Posluns's The Fourth World: An Indian Reality(1974). Stewart calls Wynter's racial-spatial concept "a zone of exile … made up of slices and pockets of the nations, cities, suburbs … factories … borderlands, rural areas, and reservations that share more in common with the struggles of populations around the world dispossessed in modernity's wake than they do with the affluent First World citadels of recognizably American imperial power" (11); she borrows from George Manuel the idea of a "Fourth World" that relies on the establishment of "the priority of land as the basis … for human knowledge about being-in-the-world" (7). [End Page 326] Each of Stewart's four chapters reads a pair of novels to flesh out stages of decolonization found in angry planet fiction in which the terrestrial motion of the earth strikes back against colonial-capitalism and its infrastructures: Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon(1997) and Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist(1999); John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire(1985) and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange(1997); Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead(1991) and Héctor Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier(1998); and also Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart(1990) and Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower(1993). If, as Stewart quotes from Frantz Fanon, projects of decolonization are always destined to be violent, Angry Planetis aware of the difficulties of land-based decolonization projects that demand more than the metaphoric (following also Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor" [2012]). Each chapter reflects these difficulties and ultimately reveals the narrative-ontological limitations of these novels. Chapter one, "Terraforming the New World," reads the ways in which "bodies become physically entangled by racialization within the structures of colonial capitalist social order" (37). She cites historical novels by Pynchon and Whitehead that understand the violent entrapment of...