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This chapter lays out the context behind the shamanism that has proliferated in Mongolia in the aftermath of the collapse of socialism. It discusses existing assumptions behind shamanism, what constitutes shamanism in postsocialist Mongolia, and its multiple meanings in the context of Buryats’ relationship with the state. The supernatural and material are interconnected, but these connections are insecure and volatile, mirroring the chaotic political and economic conditions of a weak postsocialist state.The author argues that while Buryat shamans and their clients strive to engage in capitalism and gain economic resources, shamanic practices cause them to gain history instead. Thus this book adds to the study of different life-worlds beyond the universalization of capital, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words. Shamanism starkly shows the limits of capitalism; even the people who actively seek to be a part of capitalism end up creating a world alternative to it. This process also shows the dialectical, mutually-constitutive, but conflicting and colliding nature of different life-worlds, despite the fact that shamanism has often been modernity’s disowned creation. In this chapter, the author also introduces her fieldwork, which revealed shamanic competition and rivalry, clients’ suspicions, and the connections between gender, space, and power.

Introduces the figure of Contamination as an alternative to dialectics. Challenging various concepts of purity, Contaminations enables us to recognise the simultaneity of catastrophe and hope, of anxiety and grace. It develops the figure of contamination through a close reading of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom. Analyses how the satirical irony of Freedom operates at the level of incongruity: Walter Berglund’s moralistic stance fighting the evil of the Anthropocene (humanity’s overpopulation) clashes with the ruthlessness of his actions (colliding with the interests the coal industry). Walter separates society from nature, playing off the latter against the former. Walter thus creates a notion of nature as pure entity which he opposes to the pollutions caused by humanity. The human induced destruction of our planet dialectically ensures the triumph of the positive after ecological collapse. In dialectical manner ‘collapse’ morphs into ‘a window of opportunity’. Walter’ environmental activism actually supports the destruction of the environment: he campaigns for the mining of coal (in order preserve a bird species). In search for the positive we delude ourselves about what is truly harmful. Walter Berglund evaporates his own sense of freedom by dialectically turning the negative into the positive: by spinning ecological collapse into opportunities for preservation.

Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies develop cognitive-affective maps of empire that reveal its totalizing ambitions. They deploy realist techniques to do so while displaying an intense self-consciousness about such techniques’ limitations. The maps they draw link the Atlantic world (and slavery) with the Indian Ocean (and indentured servitude). This angle of vision moves the historical novel’s frame of reference beyond both the nation and the mono-oceanic paradigms that have emerged as alternatives to nation-based understandings. Finally, and drawing especially on the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, the chapter shows that the novels retrieve from historicist time the inassimilable, heterotemporal residues of utopian alternatives to the colonial, which draw upon while radically refashioning “premodern” and pre-secular modes of affinity.

The Introduction lays the theoretical groundwork and historical frame for the main chapters. It engages debates on materialist vs. poststructuralist approaches to postcolonial studies; on the utopian imagination; on expanding the black Atlantic frame of reference to include the Indian Ocean; on the Anglophone biases of postcolonial studies and how these implicate the discipline in contemporary capitalism; on the genesis of the historical novel in the nineteenth century; and on the cycles of finance capital to which the postcolonial inflection of historical fiction is a response. Theorists discussed include Giovanni Arrighi, Ian Baucom, Walter Benjamin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frederic Jameson, and Georg Lukács.

The book’s point of departure is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) claim that the analytical tools of our mainstream historicism are irredeemably Eurocentrist, thereby causing us to lose the experiences of non-western peoples in translation. It aims to build on this postcolonial critique of historicism in three ways. First, our conventional historicist devices are not just Eurocentrist but essentially modernist. They cause us to lose in translation the experiences of all non-modern peoples, non-western and western alike. Second, this modernism is problematic specifically because it authorizes us to align non-modern realities with our own peculiarly modern ontological commitments, fundamentally altering the contents of those realities in the process. Third, to produce histories that are more ethically defensible, philosophically robust, and historically meaningful, we need to take an ontological turn in our practice. We need to analyse each non-modern lifeworld on its own ontological terms, in its own metaphysical conjuncture, according to its own particular standards of truth and realness. To support these three claims, the book uses the proverbially western lifeworld of classical Athens (ca. 480-320 BC) as its primary case study.

Moreover, standard histories of Athens are riddled with the same kinds of problems that postcolonial critics have seen in the mainstream “histories” of non-western lifeworlds. To support this claim, the chapter considers three especially influential accounts of the formation of the Athenian politeia. In all three cases, this process is quite explicitly historicized as a story of modern-style “democratization,” as a progressive extension of a political or civic equality to every (male) Athenian, even though this account is quite strenuously resisted by all of our ancient sources. More generally, much as the postcolonial critique of historicism would lead us to expect, when we historicize demokratia as “democracy,” we inevitably end up figuring Athens as an incomplete or imperfect anticipation of a modern lifeworld, never as a fully realized version of itself.