Prof. Stacey Balkan Reviews Ann Stewart's Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World

Congratulations to Prof. Stacey Balkan—her review of Ann Stewart's Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World appears in the journal Studies in the Novel (Volume 55, Number 3, Fall 2023).

An exerpt from Balkan's review:

In Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World, [Ann] Stewart argues for a "geo-epistemological" (38) reading of colonial-capitalist infrastructures framed by precisely this sort of radical "interconnectedness." Such a reading requires a prioritization of planetary agency and a radical break from vague theories of "vibrant matter" (á la Jane Bennett) in favor of the messy racial assemblages that actually constitute our global petrosphere. Building upon Alexander Weheliye's concept of the "racial assemblage," and rejecting "new" materialist theories that privilege a nebulous "network" over and against its connective tissues, Angry Planet tracks the ways in which forms of insurrectionary planetary motion—a seismic shock, a cyclone, a slumping dam—align with the radical political movements initiated by historically marginalized communities in the latter half of the twentieth century (39). [End Page 356] Specifically, Angry Planet illustrates "tectonic motion…in furious alignment with the novel's revolutionaries who resist colonial resource exploitation and infrastructural development" (16). The result is a series of extraordinarily illuminating chapters on otherwise familiar novels. [ . . . ]

 

Laguna with Angry Planet; photo courtesy of Stacey Balkan @sbalkan5; used with permission