Disembodiment and Deworlding: Taking Decolonial Feminist Political Ecology to ground in Attappady, Kerala

In the first article, Disembodiment and Deworlding: A Decolonial Feminist Political Ecology Analysis of Violent Land Loss in Attappady, I examine the socio-political-ecological history of land alienation in Attappady from a decolonial feminist political ecology standpoint using the theory of rooted networks, exposing the material and ontological violence of structural and systemic land enclosure, theft and land grabbing. I show how Adivasi land struggles are better understood as decolonial resistances against ecological and socio-political disembodiment at the bodily level, and deworlding at the ontological level. In doing so, I offer a contextually relevant alternative to the Marxian 'dispossession' framework to understand the complexity of land alienation in the Adivasi case. In my second article, Queering Resistance, Queering Research: In Search of a Decolonial Feminist Understanding of Adivasi Indigeneity, I explore the hidden complexities of contemporary Adivasi indigeneity by employing a queer decolonial feminist framework that positions indigeneity within a space of queerness. I show how land loss and alienation impact Adivasi materiality beyond livelihood by affecting structural changes in various realms, including the environment, gender, sexuality, spirituality and health. For instance, I show how colonial (and 'postcolonial') ideas and policies surrounding nature and culture transformed Adivasi land-use patterns and practices, contributing to environmental degradation, climate change, sexual violence and increased neonatal and infant mortality. In my third article, Decolonizing Environmental Justice: Autonomy, Sovereignty and Ontological Justice in Attappady, Kerala, I argue that a decolonial reconceptualization of environmental justice can be politically productive for Adivasi struggles over land autonomy and food sovereignty. By rethinking the modern/colonial binaries inherent in existing environmental justice theories, I argue for an environmental justice complex that includes ontological justice by incorporating the relational understandings developed and employed by Adivasis in their multispecies worlds.;This dissertation draws from two sets of field research conducted in Attappady, Kerala: pre-dissertation 2010-2015 (about 8 months) and dissertation research in 2016 (6 months). Using a decolonial feminist research methodology, I undertook a place-based ethnographic study visiting 82 of 192 hamlets, interviewing Adivasis from over 100 hamlets. I employed the narrative interview method to learn about land ontologies, with interviews typically ranging between 45 minutes to 2.5 hours. I conducted over 85 individual and group interviews (~ 40 percent female) in Malayalam, Tamil and English with members of the Irular, Mudugar, Kurumbar Adivasi communities, rural settler families, local government officials, forest, education and tribal department officials, Adivasi and non-Adivasi land rights activists, and NGO workers. While transcribed interviews and notes are my primary data source, I also draw from secondary research at the Tamilnadu State Archives, the National Archives of India in New Delhi examining colonial records, and at other libraries researching academic and media publications. In my analysis, I examine both primary and secondary data, alongside relevant land and forest legislation, particularly, the Forest Rights Act of 2007, the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996, and the Land Acquisition Act of 2011, to not only understand the multiple land ontologies at play, but also develop a longitudinal analysis of the socio-ecological history and geography of Attappady's Adivasis in order to contextualize, in an ethnographically rich fashion, the political ecology of their current land struggles.;Overall, my dissertation contributes to a globally emergent body of decolonial research on indigeneity, and within this, it currently stands as the only decolonial feminist study of contemporary Adivasi indigeneity. It challenges current understandings of indigeneity as rooted in place alone, instead showing the existence of rooted networks through a grounded environmental history of Attappady centered on land. By bringing queer theory into conversation with decolonial and feminist theories in the Indian context, it also adds to the growing body of theory derived from interdisciplinary work in feminist geography and feminist political ecology. Further, through a decolonial feminist critique of 'dispossession', it challenges the Eurocentric reductionism of all relations to land to property and ownership, and instead offers a decolonial, ontologically contextual alternative in ideas of disembodiment, and deworlding where land is part of the networked body of the Adivasi living world. By expanding present conceptions of indigeneity and indigenous resistances, such decolonial feminist critique also widens the scope of related fields such as sustainability studies, food sovereignty, climate justice and environmental justice. By using a decolonial feminist methodology in the study of resistance, and by intentionally using a majority of literature from native, indigenous/decolonial and feminist academics and activists, this dissertation is in solidarity with the fourth world, and its move to center decolonial (& feminist) knowledges and research within the academy. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).