Jungle Publics—Version 1.0
Envisioning a radical knowledge-making ecosystem
This publication is an act of epistemic protest and wild hope1. Our ambition is to consolidate a group of "insurgent" maker-thinkers—radical, multisectoral, interdisciplinary, and committed to the growing call for urgent civic transformation and planetary regeneration. We intend to build a body of what we call "nexus literatures," i.e. intersectional2 entry points into critical, anticolonial, and liberatory discourses on art, design, language, culture, and science.
The jungle is not what we may believe: the lion is a king of no jungle; it is neither kill-or-be-killed nor a survival of the fittest; and it is certainly not the primitive, lawless outland caricatured in bizarre imperial fantasies of an Oriental Other. That “jungle” is the bastard child of a self-indulgent Occident, a corruption, a unilateral translation paraded as universal truth. It is a loan word from the original Sanskrit—जंगल, jāṅgala, an “impenetrable tangle.” And yet, the colonizer insists on penetration, regardless of consent; so the tangle is unmade, then wrapped tight around their fingers until all feeling is lost.
“Those are your divisions, the false dichotomies and the hegemonic hierarchies of materialist colonizers. We, too, have been the slaves of your desires, unwitting tools, forging the destruction of the planet, and things will change whether you like it or not. In the end days of the Anthropocene (your word, your hubris, not ours), Matter is making a comeback. We are taking back our bodies, reclaiming our material selves. In a neo-materialist world, Every Thing Matters.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and EmptinessIn its native cosmology, the jungle is a deeply relational and rhizomatic biome; a network of interdependent entities that thrive on mutual support, cooperation, and complexity3. It is a space where life, in its myriad forms, interweaves and intra-acts4 with the material environment, to inform/exchange/diffuse amongst one another. Human intervention in the Anthropocene has clearly complicated the fine balance of trophic cascades5. Just consider the concrete jungles we reside in: inert in structure but breathing with life. The subway holds its people tight, phones held tighter, screening the immaterial networks connecting bodies near and far. (Sounds of fallen trees can now be heard on Reels or Tiktoks!) Consequently, we are all observers and participants in a never-ending jungle.
Atomized, made legible6, and inert: a colonial imposition of modern development has flattened the natural topography, (both literally and technocratically) deeming all else as savage, forever haunting the scarred land that was once jungle. Dismantling the hierarchizing power in this narrative, Jungle Publics demands a re-representation of these symbiotic relationships; where commensality between entities (and sub-entities within them) drives the heart of civilization.
Our civilization today is anything but civil—what happened? Most likely, we’ve outgrown ourselves, our tried and tested methods, our institutions have and are failing us. A hundred years of globalization—presented as a commitment to the free flow of ideas, cultures, and commerce—is now revealing itself to be the strategic indenturing of Euro-US colonial power7. And so, in response to Modernity self-constituting through its shadows, we aim to legitimize the spaces in-between the corporeal, and speak to how the material world reflects and informs them.
Welcome to Jungle Publics—a collective of rigorous writing and writers, as multifaceted and interdependent as the challenges they seek to address. We invite you to join us as we rethink our relationship with the planet and each other.
RMIT Culture. (2023, September 9). Wild hope: Indy Johar keynote. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQJjfCSPvJI.
Crenshaw, K. (2022). On Intersectionality: Essential Writings. New Press.
Shankar, P. (2023). Planetary Perspectives #1: No One Lives On The Globe. Polycene Design Manual. Center for Complexity at RISD. https://polycene.design/No-One-Lives-on-the-Globe.
Stark, W. (2016, August 15). Almanac - Intra-action. New Materialism. https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/i/intra-action.html
Barad, K. M. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.
Macfarlane, R. (2016, April 1). Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever.
Scott, J. C. (2020). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.
Hui, Y. (2017, November). Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics. e-Flux Journal. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/86/161887/cosmotechnics-as-cosmopolitics.