Decolonial Hope Planetary Sustainability and Literary Responses

Introduction: Contextualizing decolonial hope: Thinking for coexistence and planetary sustainability

Goutam Karmakar and Janet M. Wilson

1. The hopeful possibilities of “sideways” time: Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God

Amanda Lagji

2. “This grief not only ours to bear”: Hope in shalan joudry’s Km+tkinu (Homeland)

Leonor María Martínez Serrano

3. Hopegoing: Animist metaphor as deferred hope in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

Jay Rajiva

4. To hope or to weep? Slow hope in Rohan Chakravarty’s green humour series

Arundhathi Baburaj and Girish D. Pawar

5. Making it hot: Eco-militancy and survivance in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were

Lava Asaad

6. Entangled futures: Energy production, ecospirituality, and decolonial hope in Indian solarpunk fiction

Tehmina Pirzada and Saba Pirzadeh

7. Love and landscape: Decolonial resistance, solidarity, and hope in The God of Small Things

Cui Chen

8. Dismantling cyborg politics: Decolonial hope in Chinese science fiction

Xiaohui Liang

9. Countering capitalist ethics: Ecological empathy, hope, and environmental education in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass

Nimetullah Aldemir and Mustafa Zekí Çirakli

Biography

Goutam Karmakar teaches in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad, India, with affiliations and research positions at Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities, University of Cologne, Germany, and the Faculty of Arts and Design, Durban University of Technology, South Africa. He has received several fellowships, including the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in Germany, National Research Foundation awards in South Africa, and the MIASA Individual Fellowship in Ghana. His research spans Global South literature, postcolonial and decolonial studies, cultural studies, and environmental humanities. Karmakar edits the journal Global South Literary Studies and the Routledge book series South Asian Literature in Focus.

Janet M. Wilson is Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. She earlier taught for a decade in the Department of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Her research spans postcolonial memory, diaspora, authorship, transculturalism, and the cultural politics of Aotearoa/New Zealand. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and has co-edited volumes on postcolonial writing, transnationalism, and diaspora. She is Co-Editor of the series Studies in World Literature (Ibidem), Chair of Challenging Precarity: A Global Network, and recently co-edited Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis: Planetary Precarity and Future Habitability (2025).