Undomesticating Political Ecologies in Miriam Pirbhai’s Outside People

Abstract

This essay reads Mariam Pirbhai’s 2017 short story collection, Outside People, as a narrative guide to the political ecology of Canadian bordering practices. Bordering describes the ways in which human and non-human beings get marked for inclusion or disposal, protection or exploitation. The essay focuses on the mode of bordering that Ghassan Hage calls “generalized domestication”: a practice of homemaking that is “paradoxically… also a mode of domination, control, extraction, and exploitation” (91). Outside People highlights the ways in which the selective domestication of the world outside Canadian borders works to support the settler-colonial good life. The collection depicts the lives of migrants navigating the environments of racial capitalism to forge connections across cultures, languages and species. The stories also highlight the spillover, through tourism, mining and international adoption, of extractive domestication practices beyond the borders of Canada. In addition to exposing the mechanisms of domination that underlie myths of Canadianness, Outside People tells stories that evade extractive and liberal-national capture and make alliances in support of alternative, undomesticated forms of inhabitation.