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Contemporary postcolonial critiques of cosmopolitanism, such as Homi Bhabha’s ( 1994) “vernacular cosmopolitanism” examine the contradictory nature of the local coexisting with the global, as informed by a Eurocentric universalism rooted in nationalism. Cosmopolitanism is intrinsically problematic, since it is rooted in a humanism that privileges certain individuals as more human than others and neglects the agency of nonhumans. Recent work in the postcolonial environmental humanities ( DeLoughrey 2011 Didur 2006, 2011, 2012 Marzec 2009 Mukherjee 2010 Nixon 2011 Huggan and Tiffin 2010 Vadde 2009) seeks to reconcile what appear to be unexamined humanist strands of cosmopolitan thinking with efforts to reorient its anthropocentrism via communities historically designated less than human (Black, Indigenous, queer, people of color). Reading the novel’s protagonist, Mala, as a posthuman figure, I argue that her rejection of human language, in conjunction with her nonhuman interactions, positions her as a keeper of collectivity, as she creates a third space of subjectivity in her garden that blurs the boundaries between humans and nonhumans.

Mootoo’s work decenters how we think about humans and the environment and offers a nuanced depiction of a positive interspecies community that resists harmful humanist taxonomies.

Examining interspecies alliances in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, I look towards terrestrial cosmopolitanism as an alternative to anthropocentric forms of cosmopolitanism that continue to reinscribe colonialist aspirations and ontologically exclusionary practices. This article explores a terrestrial cosmopolitanism that challenges the colonial discourse of human exceptionalism by extending the democratization of people to include environmental bodies within their global context, replacing hierarchies with collectivities to reveal humanism’s underrepresented others. Cosmopolitanism has generally been used to describe a philosophy that imagines all humans as citizens of a single “human” community.