Land of the Hornbill, Home of the Captive
“In other words, we are different and together; what I have become is only possible because of what you have become, and the encounter between us had and has the power to transform each of us. This is the matter of affect, which we feel on the surface of skin and on the surface of earth.” Juno Salazar Parreñas Introduction What does it mean to “care” for a species whose very need for care stems from the same systems that displaced the people now tending to them? In Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation, Juno Salazar Parreñas confronts the messy, uneven, and often painful work of sustaining orangutan life in postcolonial Malaysia. Far from the romanticized image of conservation as a pure good, Parreñas reveals the tangled web of colonial legacies, capitalist extraction, and multispecies entanglements that shape every act of feeding, training, and even restraining these animals. This paper examines Decolonizing Extinction through ...