More-Than-Human Diasporas: Topologies of Empire, Settler Colonialism, Slavery

Puglieses MoreThanHuman Diasporas breaks the confines of existing scholarship in its vision of the way that morethanhuman diasporic entitiessuch as water, trees, clay, stone and architectural styleshave functioned as agents within the context of empire, settler colonialism and a largely effaced history of Mediterranean enslavement, a history that preexisted and then coincided with the Atlantic slave trade. This book traces, for example, the diasporic travels of the eucalyptus from Indigenous Country to Joseph Banks botanical collection in London and then onto a grand Englishstyle garden in Southern Italy which was built on the historically effaced labour of enslaved people.

By deploying techniques of historical recovery, this book brings to light otherwise buried histories, thereby demonstrating the pivotal role of Mediterranean enslavement in the shaping of Italian society and culture. This book develops a topological understanding of cultural history to account for the complex spatiotemporal effects that connect seemingly disparate times, spaces and morethanhuman entities within networks of relationality. In this innovative scholarly work, morethanhuman diasporic entities function as conceptual keys to histories which would otherwise remain hidden, thereby revealing desubjugated knowledges which reconfigure anthropocentric histories and further the process of decolonisation.

This book will be of interest to readers interested in transnational and local histories of empire, settler colonialism and slavery.