The Language of the Dusk: Anthropocentrism, Time, and Decoloniality in the Work of Ursula K. Le Guin

In this chapter we trace Le Guin’s struggles against the time-destroying forces of colonization and eco-devastation, and track her interest in the possibilities of nonhuman time. We emphasize her debt to the scientific and temporal literacies of indigenous peoples while interrogating her placement of indigenous lifeways in a supposedly lost past. We argue that it is only by situating indigenous knowledge of the temporality of the nonhuman in the ongoing present that the narrative of progressive, linear time driving colonial extraction can be combated. Rereading Le Guin’s early work in the light of her later inventions, we put her commitment to nonlinear temporalities into practice and excavate the many glimpses of a more utopian, non-anthropocentric relation to time which lies buried and waiting in her oeuvre.