The idea of resilience is everywhere these days, offering a framework for thriving in volatile times. Dominant resilience stories share an attachment to a mythologized past thought to hold clues for navigating a future that is understood to be full of danger. These stories also uphold values of settler colonialism and white supremacy.

What the World Might Look Like examines the way resilience thinking has come to dominate the settler-colonial imagination and explores alternative approaches to resilience writing that instead offer decolonial models of thought. The book traces settler-colonial resilience stories to the rise of resilience science in the 1970s and 1980s, illustrating how the discipline supports the projects of white supremacy and colonialism. Working to unravel the blanket of common sense that shrouds the idea of resilience, the book is equally cautious of settler-colonial antiresilience stories that invoke the idea of death as an antidote to unbearable life. Susie O’Brien argues that, although the dominant narratives of resilience are problematic, resilience itself is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Appreciating the significance of resilience stories requires asking what worlds and what communities they are meant to preserve. Looking at the fiction of Alexis Wright, David Chariandy, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, O’Brien points to the potential of Black and Indigenous thinking around resilience to figure decolonial possibilities for planetary flourishing.

Exposing the complexities and limits of resilience, What the World Might Look Like questions the concept of resilience, highlighting how Black and Indigenous novelists can offer different decolonial ways of thinking about and with resilience to imagine things “otherwise.”

Susie O’Brien is professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University.

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“O’Brien has written an important, fearless book that will spur the debate over what resilience means, or should mean, in settler-colonial society and beyond. What the World Might Look Like is an essential read for anyone interested in the political and cultural work of narratives.” Michael Basseler, Justus Liebig University Giessen

“What the World Might Look Like constitutes a serious advance in our understanding of resilience as an organizing narrative in settler-colonial contexts and as a narrative form itself.” Jennifer Henderson, Carleton University