In this paper, I aim to stimulate praxis reflections about the ways in which Western scholars could approach Indigenous literatures without running the risk of voice appropriation. I wish to show how the perspective of a non-Indigenous “Multi-Perspective Culturally Responsive Researcher (MPCR)” can shed light on Indigenous novels from Canada and New Zealand, Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) and Whiti Hereaka’s Kurangaituku (2021). In their article “Research Is Relational: Exploring Researcher Identities and Colonial Echoes in Pacific and Indigenous Studies,” Tui Nicola Clery, Acacia Dawn Cochise, and Robin Metcalfe describe the MPCR stance as a way of engaging sensitively and responsibly with different cultures. These scholars conceptualise the MPCR stance as rooted in the Samoan notion of teu le va: “To teu le va is to attend to, care for, and nurture the relationships and relational spaces among and between people […]. Working within the va involves working critically and thoughtfully in the “inter” in the spaces between people, cultures, and disciplines” (306). I shall thus seek to demonstrate how comparative literary poetics facilitates the implementation of a trans-Indigenous MPCR practice, thus creating a dialogue between scholars of different cultural positionalities, whether Indigenous or non-Indigenous, “which better reflects the complex realities of an increasingly globalized and transnational world” (307).

My first case study examines the use of the Native myths of the Trickster and the Windigo in First Nation Canadian writer Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow. Based on an apocalyptic scenario, this novel depicts how a northern Ontario native reserve suddenly loses access to power. This may be due, we come to understand, to a complete technological collapse experienced by white society. For the Indigenous community, this entails a desperate quest for survival, as supplies of food and gas progressively diminish throughout the hard winter. Indigenous storytelling pervades the novel, specifically when a character named Dan recounts to his grandchildren a variant of the story of the Indigenous trickster, also known as Nanabush, and its encounter with geese. Magical realism also characterizes the novel’s aesthetic, as the supernatural and the ordinary merge through the figure of a white man named Scott, who turns out to be a replica of the Windigo, a native mythical monster. In an echo of the Windigo’s treacherous nature, Scott displays cannibalistic instincts. In an attempt to survive, he and his friends devour the corpses of the members of the Indigenous community who died during the crisis. However, thanks to their sense of endurance and solidarity, the natives manage to survive. Indeed, the epilogue entitled “Spring” suggests the possibility of a new departure.

Kurangaituku, authored by the young Māori novelist Whiti Hereaka, reveals a different perspective on Indigeneity, which is mostly reflected in the novel’s formal innovations. The combination of an MCPR stance and comparative poetics enables Western scholars to engage with this world vision. While Moon of the Crusted Snow displays only sporadic instances of magical realism, the universe of Kurangaituku is steeped from the start in the supernatural universe of mythology, which in the ambiguous mode typical of magical realism is presented as if it were real. Within this framework, the Māori mythological story of Hatupatu and the bird-woman is retold from the perspective of the female protagonist, thus suggesting the importance of female agency. The novel comprises three narratives. The first chronicles the life of Kurangaituku, her ensuing meeting with Hatupatu, and her subsequent death after being betrayed by her male lover. The second, which can be accessed from the reverse side of the book, enables the reader to follow the journey of Kurangaituku in the Underworld. The reader is actually invited to discover these two opposed narratives in the way he/she chooses, which presupposes a blurring between beginning and end reflecting the non-linear aspect of Māori epistemology. The two narratives converge in the retelling of the mythical story of Hatupatu in a more traditional way in the central section of the volume, entitled “Hatupatu and the Bird-woman.” Eventually, it is suggested Kurangaituku continues to live though the stories told about her.

All in all, placing Moon of the Crusted Snow in a trans-Indigenous conversation with Kurangaituku evidences the polymorphous nature of Indigenous literary forms. Therefore, they cannot be homogenized. They can only be approached by Western scholars through a methodology that construes comparative poetics as an illustration of an MPCR attitude, i.e., as a relational tool bridging rigid cultural dichotomies between Western and Indigenous world views.

Work Cited

Clery, Tui Nicola, Acacia Dawn Cochise, and Robin Metcalfe. “Research Is Relational: Exploring Researcher Identities and Colonial Echoes in Pacific and Indigenous Studies.” Pacific Studies 38.3 (December 2015): 303–36.

Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), an emblematic writer who belongs to the classical canon of modern Japanese literature. Despite being a well known figure within Japan, interpretations to the light of new mechanisms of reading are lacking. Under this methods we find postcolonial readings through Gayatri Spivak’s theoretical framework.

For this endeavor, Soseki’s opus magnum, I Am a Cat (1905-1906) is at the center of this research. Through Soseki’s eloquent and satirical depictions, a scenery of a society thrust upon projects of Western fascination and cultural adaptation towards the fiction constructed by Japan of what the West is, tied to principles of imperialist expansion, a narrative ripe for postcolonial interpretation germinates. While Soseki is examined through a postcolonial optic, he is not portrayed as a postcolonial author. His critical approach was limited by his own Eurocentric-colonial epistemological framework, holding unsolved contradictions. However, the deconstruction of his work through Spivak’s methodology holds great value for postcolonial studies.

2025 marks the seventieth anniversary of the Bandung Conference, one of the landmark events of Third World solidarity and decolonisalisation in the twentieth century. The border-crossing aesthetic and political imagination of post-independence anticolonial thought made it possible to envision such solidarity – unity in heterogeneity – across the Global South.

Postcolonial state-building in the mid-twentieth century required a combination of pathos and pragmatism. The world that anticolonial activism brought into existence only vaguely resembled the world it had endeavoured to create; national independence was the bare minimum of anticolonialism’s demands. The great decolonial wave that swelled across the Global South left newly independent countries beached on the shores of the Cold War. For Fanon, the post-independence world was no less “Manichean” than the colonial world. History repeated itself, first as empires, then as blocs.

​In response, post-independence political thinkers returned to their training in sociology to insist on alternative forms of political community beyond and underneath the nation-state. This paper argues that it was via social sciences that it became possible to imagine a singular category of ‘the oppressed’ which nevertheless retained a heterogeneous quality – rendered in its grandest form at Bandung in 1955. At one level, this observation is made possible by a curious historical coincidence: that future African American, African, and Indian leaders all received degrees in the social sciences, many of them still relatively new. At another level, however, this observation is made possible by the use of these social sciences to produce ‘a new man’. At various points throughout the first half of the twentieth century, black American, African, and Indian thinkers forced a variety of social sciences to ‘hesitate’ (in DuBois’s famous formulation), to stumble back on themselves, to produce a space for new categories, as well as confluences of those categories.

This included W.E.B. DuBois’s and B.R. Ambedkar’s interest in sociology; Jawaharlal Nehru’s interest in political science; Jomo Kenyatta’s interest in anthropology; Frantz Fanon’s commitment to psychoanalysis; and Kwame Nkrumah’s creation of socio-mathematics. In other words, these thinkers used the emergent social sciences to produce new forms of identity, which in turn relied on new aesthetic, ethical, and philosophical protocols offered in the guise of sociology, anthropology, and political science. By causing these relatively new social sciences to “hesitate” these thinkers opened up the space to reconsider identity as a historical and political category, which had been made only partly possible by earlier thinkers. 2025 marks the seventieth anniversary of the Bandung Conference, one of the landmark events of Third World solidarity and decolonisalisation in the twentieth century. The border-crossing aesthetic and political imagination of post-independence anticolonial thought made it possible to envision such solidarity – unity in heterogeneity – across the Global South.

This article examines the role of nonhuman narrative in world literature through the kalpavigyan (Indian science fiction/fantasy) of Satyajit Ray. While Ray is internationally recognized for the humanist ethos of his films, his literary oeuvre – particularly his kalpavigyan short stories –foregrounds encounters between human and nonhuman entities, including super-abled animals, extraterrestrial beings, and artificial intelligence. These narratives engage with global traditions of nonhuman storytelling, from indigenous cosmologies and magical realism to contemporary posthumanist fiction, offering a distinct postcolonial perspective on interspecies relations. Ray’s fiction does not, however, fully embrace the posthumanist decentering of the human; rather, posthuman themes coexist in these stories with an appeal to human ethics and indigenous mythological references that situate them in the humanist cultural discourse of world literature. I will argue, therefore, that Ray’s position regarding interspecies relations can be described as a proto-posthuman cosmopolitanism.

Situating kalpavigyan within world literature, this article examines Ray’s work alongside broader traditions of nonhuman representation. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s theorization of “minor science,” Isabel Stengers’ concept of “cosmopolitics,” and Judith Butler’s notion of precarity, I explore how Ray’s narratives engage with interspecies ethics, revisionary fantasies premised on the theory of evolution, and postcolonial critiques of Western epistemology. Stories such as "Khagam" and "Mr. Shasmal’s Final Night" feature spectral animals that trouble anthropocentric distinctions between human and nonhuman deaths, echoing animist traditions and global eco-fictional critiques of speciesism. Meanwhile, Ray’s Professor Shonku stories – populated by sentient machines, prehistoric creatures, and enigmatic nonhuman intelligences – resonate with transnational science fiction narratives that problematize the constructed boundaries between species and technologies.

By examining Ray’s engagement with nonhuman agency within the kalpavigyan tradition, this article theorizes the zoöpolitical nuances of his proto-posthuman cosmopolitanism. His speculative fiction neither fully dissolves human-nonhuman distinctions nor reaffirms human exceptionalism but instead constructs a framework in which ethical proximity to nonhuman others reshapes both scientific inquiry and moral consciousness. In doing so, Ray’s narratives contribute to a broader literary discourse on nonhuman storytelling, demonstrating how speculative fiction from a postcolonial context offers alternative epistemologies of interspecies relations and challenges the hegemony of Eurocentric and anthropocentric knowledge in world literature.