The special issue of our open access, Q2 journal explores how contemporary literary, artistic and cultural practices engage with, interrogate, and imagine decolonial ecologies. While decolonial ecology is best understood as a constellation of different ideas, schools, and disciplines, Malcom Ferdinand’s insistence on the politicization of ecology offers a useful point of departure. In his book, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2019; English trans. 2022), Ferdinand identifies a “double fracture” in modernity:the colonial fracture, which produces hierarchies among people, and the environmental fracture, which separates humans from nature, treating the latter as an object of exploitation. For Ferdinand, these fractures are inextricably intertwined, such that the histories of colonization and slavery cannot be separated from the exploitation of the natural world. This entanglement provides the conceptual foundation for the special issue.

Rather than further delineating the theoretical boundaries of decolonial ecology, the issue turns to contemporary cultural production to explore its potential to imagine and articulate alternative ways of conceiving the ecological world. It approaches art and literature not merely as illustrations of decolonial ecology but as forms of inquiry. How do contemporary cultural practices bring colonial and environmental concerns into conversation, and what new forms of ecological relation might they reveal? What can aesthetic practices make visible or imaginable that theoretical approaches alone may not, and how does aesthetic form itself contribute to decolonial ecological thinking? Here, cultural production is broadly understood to encompass literature, nonfiction writing, visual and digital media as well as public and participatory art, such as installations, murals, memorials. The special issue seeks theoretically grounded and culturally sensitive contributions that attend to the specific forms and contexts through which cultural practices engage with the possibilities of decolonial ecology in the Global South and beyond.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

-       Colonialism and environmental violence

-       Land, landscape, and colonial spatialities

-       Energy, infrastructure, and extractive ecologies

-       Indigenous epistemologies and world-making

-       The Anthropocene and its decolonial critiques

-       Race, coloniality, environment, and environmental justice

-       Multispecies and more-than-human entanglements

-       Water, oceanic histories, and colonial ecologies

-       Ecological loss, memory, resistance, and repair

-       Speculative worlds and alternative ecological futures

Submissions from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives are welcome, including, but not limited to literary studies, cultural studies, and visual culture.

Papers of 5000-7000 words should be submitted by 31st January 2027 to gyuris.kata@btk.elte.hu Submissions should conform to the HJEAS submission guidelines: https://reference-global.com/journal/HJEAS?tab=submission-guidelines#journal-tabs

For inquiries or to discuss potential topics, please contact the Special Issue Editor, Kata Gyuris, using the email address provided above.