When the Nonhuman Speaks in Nineteenth-Century Canton

Abstract This essay proposes a literary understanding of posthuman multilingualism as a way to rethink ecological consciousness and literary production on a global scale by turning to a historical site that once anchored the interconnected realities of global English, colonial capitalism, and ecological exploitation: nineteenth-century Canton. Focusing on this historically specific Canton, whose multilingual reality is imbricated in and manifested by a multispecies ecosystem, this essay reorients an understanding of the nineteenth century as a key moment in the periodization of the Anthropocene by foregrounding the politics of multilingualism in the era’s imperial extractivism.