Faculty Publications
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Publications by NITK Faculty
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Item Decolonial Myths and Demi-gods of the Tropics: The More-than-Human Worlds of Manasa and Olokun(James Cook University, 2023) Joseph, S.R.; Koudur, S.In response to the current age of the Anthropocene, Posthumanist studies explore multispecies' entanglements and encounters in order to move away from the colonial binaries that separate humans from the environment. Adding to these studies, this paper explores the role of mythology in decolonising the Westerncentric strategies of narration. Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and Rita Indiana’s Tentacle, envision the relationship of the human with other species against the deepening climate crisis, bringing to the fore the often-discounted discourses of cultural myths. In Gun Island, Manasa, the quintessential nagini is a folk deity of fear-based Nature worship from the Bay of Bengal, and an outsider to the established pantheon of Hindu gods. The Yoruba deity, Olokun, and his/her incarnations, move across the three time periods in Tentacle emerging as the saviour of the Caribbean islands. The novels reinterpret and re-evaluate the tropical Indigenous myths to implement alternate approaches of knowing and being in the world. This article seeks to explore how posthumanist and decolonial perspectives in these mythologies create new alliances that stretch across space, time, and species, symbolising the relationality of all life. The paper delves into the power of the mythical deities to highlight the existence of an interconnected network of human and more-than-human realms. © 2023, eTropic. All Rights Reserved.Item Reimagining the Lagosian Landscape in Lagoon: Extraterrestrials, Geoengineering, and a More-than-Human Ecology(Routledge, 2025) Joseph, S.R.; Koudur, S.Navigating an oil-ravaged ecosystem, the novel Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor elevates the landscape of Lagos to a fantastical and otherworldly space of posthuman constellations adapted for the critical exigencies of the Anthropocene crisis. By achieving new vistas, the narrative backdrop of the place conjoins actors and perspectives from a radical otherworld and the earthly realm, knitting together all planetary elements—terrestrial, aquatic, and extraterrestrial. In this article, Lagos is imagined as a site subjected to cutting-edge geoengineering technology, prefigured as a saviour landscaping technique in the Anthropocene, through the intent and interference of the extraterrestrials. With the aliens as the agents of this environmental alchemy, the landscape of Lagos has to be thought of anew, both as an agent of salvation and of rejuvenation, decentring the anthropocentric ideals that uphold the values of neocolonialism. The aliens, who call themselves the “change,” emerge as a significant placeholder, as their bodies can alter shapes and they possess the power to manipulate the physicality of other creatures. They herald “change” in their sheer presence, wherein human consciousness relents and cognition falters. The study explores a re-negotiation of human–nonhuman worlds and the events whose narrativisation destabilises human control over the landscape. Typified initially as a locale of anthropogenic activities, Lagos, later on, is cast as a ground of posthuman activity, resisting exploitation and challenging preconceived notions about the passivity of physical environments. The geoengineered Lagosian landscape effectively spans the divide between Earth’s abstract planetary space and the real, embodied environment where humans are experiencing the repercussions of the Anthropocene. © 2025 Unisa Press.