Decolonizing Extinction

How can humans and orangutans share a future together in the midst of violence and extinction? How do we embrace risk and cultivate attentiveness with endangered species? Can we let go of safe inequality? In this moving, stunning story of interspecies relations in a Malaysian wildlife center, Juno Salazar Parrenas demands we decolonize our understanding of conviviality, extinction, and loss. Functioning as an orangutan hospice, a place for palliation and not solutions, the wildlife center becomes a tragic allegory for the fate of our planet. What is to be done? Here Parrenas allows us to glimpse a different future. -- Warwick Anderson, author of * Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines * Even the processes of extinction are subject to active colonization. But what would shared vulnerability be outside violent domination and ongoing colonization of human and nonhuman others? This book's focus is the painful work of care of captive 'rehabilitating' orangutans by workers themselves enmeshed in structures of arrested autonomy. These are extraordinary, entirely unromantic social relations at the edge of extinction and at the heart of extraction and exploitation. Here is a deep, heartfelt, quite simply brilliant book that gives us a needed theory of decolonization in the everyday work of care in impossible circumstances. Who lives and who dies and how inside which practices of care? How might things-still-be otherwise? -- Donna J. Haraway, author of * Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene *