At a moment when ecological catastrophe converges with renewed forms of political authoritarianism and extractive capitalism, environmental crisis demands more than technocratic solutions; it demands emancipatory narratives. The environmental humanities have increasingly demonstrated that climate change is not merely a planetary emergency but the outcome of epistemic regimes rooted in colonial modernity. The entangled histories of ecology and colonialism have shaped territories across the non-Western world through plantation economies, resource extraction, and racial capitalism, reinforcing intellectual and ecological hierarchies. The ongoing environmental crises, thus, cannot be separated from the histories of colonial violence that transformed landscapes and societies across postcolonial contexts. To counter the climate crisis, in postcolonial locations, is thus to confront coloniality itself by challenging the dualisms inherited from the colonial episteme, particularly binaries such as: nature/culture, human/more-than-human, global/local, development/degrowth, tradition/modernity, north/south, east/west. These dualisms, deeply rooted in Western intellectual traditions, perpetuate hegemonic knowledge systems that marginalize local, indigenous, and embodied epistemologies in the subaltern geographies.

This panel repositions environmental thought beyond Western epistemological frameworks by foregrounding indigenous and other non-Western ecological narratives that refuse these inherited binaries. Universalised ‘green’ discourses, whether framed as sustainable development or climate mitigation, often obscure histories of dispossession and reproduce global inequalities. By exposing these dynamics, indigenous narratives and visual cultures reveal how environmentalism itself can sustain coloniality. Paying attention to ecological and cultural texts and practices from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia reveals strategies of survival and ecological imagination that challenge Eurocentric frameworks. Instead, they produce emancipatory environmental narratives that describe both ecological dispossession and practices of relational repair. This panel thus moves beyond critique by foregrounding creative, transdisciplinary, and cross-epistemic approaches that unsettle entrenched binaries and imagine relational modes of knowledge. In doing so, it highlights how emancipatory narratives both describe lived experience and enable agency while dismantling dualisms.

This panel seeks to move beyond critique by foregrounding creative, transdisciplinary, and cross-epistemic approaches that unsettle entrenched binaries and imagine relational modes of knowledge. Bringing in multidisciplinary scholars from Estonia (Julia Kuznetski, Professor of English at Tallinn University), Oman (Majda Atieh, Assistant Professor of Englis, Sultan Qaboos University), Nigeria (Sule Emanuel Egya, Research Professor of Public Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany), and India (Subarna De, Associated Researcher, University of Groningen, the Netherlands), it makes a critical intervention into decolonising dualisms and reconfiguring perceived ecologies through collaborative, interdisciplinary, and situated inquiry. Kuznetski will explore the entangled scales of colonialism, extractive capitalism, environment, and indigenous cosmology through the metonym of ice as a phase of planetary water. In doing so, this paper will foreground how emancipatory narratives represent water as a living archive of memory, vulnerability, and planetary entanglements in the Anthropocene. Atieh will investigate how indigenous ecological knowledge systems decolonize and rethink human relationships with natural phenomena by anchoring the Omanis’ relational knowledge of aflaj (traditional irrigation canals). Egya will foreground the ecological-decolonial perspective of the African proverbs and folktales. De will investigate how plantiness impacts resource politics in Kodagu, India, across pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial timeframes, and how dualisms such as human-plant and sacred-weed redefine the role of plants in Kodagu’s more-than-human geographies. Collectively, the panel will demonstrate how emancipatory narratives embedded in sociocultural texts articulate alternative modes of dwelling, kinship, care, and justice that transcend disciplinary boundaries beyond the West. In doing so, the papers will illuminate how emancipatory environmental narratives trouble established binaries and insist on epistemic plurality, thereby unsettling the authority of universalized “green” discourse, which often reproduces colonial hierarchies under the guise of sustainability.

Each participant will present for 10 minutes, followed by Q&A.

Four concise 10-minute presentations allow each speaker to deliver focused, high-impact arguments while maintaining the panel's overall coherence. This structure ensures sufficient time for transitions and preserves the required 15-minute open discussion, which is central to audience engagement at MLA. By prioritizing brevity and dialogue, the session fosters a more interactive and intellectually productive exchange.