Queering Time, One Durian at a Time: An Examination of the Fruit Tree as a Spatiotemporal Disruption of the Anthropocene

Abstract

This provocation is meant to examine the role of the tree as an agent of indigenous space and timescale creation within indigenous onto-epistemologies, using the example of the author’s experience with Durian seeds as well as his background as a Tamil Muslim immigrant from urban South India living in urban Malaysia. This personalized and non-structured analysis draws on Posthumanist and Postcolonial concepts to present the tree as a spatiotemporal structure that shapes and supports the Indigenous episteme, mutually emergent with the indigenous human and more-than-human ecologies, becoming with human and nonhumans, and the disruption of this treescape during the advent of the colonial Anthropocene as a restructuring force that replaced the Indigenous Imaginary with an imposed colonial Imaginary as part of the colonization process, planting additional power-knowledge structures in cleared land. This provocation then dwells on the legacy of the colonial Imaginary in a Postcolonial Anthropocenic Imaginary and the role of food as a representation of flows and new becomings-with in a globalized world, examining the latter using the GloNaCal interpretation of Vygotskian philosophy as well as Appadurai’s concept of global flow. The provocation finally identifies the planting of seeds in the disrupted ecological plane of immanence as a radical act of spatiotemporal becoming-with, anchoring the self with the Other, and creating a new assemblage with the more-than-human ecology-time that blurs the distinction between past and present, Old and New, and the Imaginaries of the Indigene and the Anthropocene. Thus, the tree’s seed and the act of planting effectively queer notions and distinctions of Space, Time, and Ecology.