‘Suspending the sky’: Virginia Woolf and the Brazilian Indigenous Worldview of Ailton Krenak

This chapter brings Woolf into dialogue with the indigenous Brazilian philosopher and activist Ailton Krenak, examining how their bodies of work offer new ways of conceptualising agency, politics and environmental justice in the Anthropocene. Beginning by excavating a methodology of outsideness in Woolf, which has its clearest articulation in her Society of Outsiders in Three Guineas (1938), this essay shows how Woolf’s writing foreshadows developments in ecofeminism and new materialism. It is in this respect, that Woolf can be reread alongside the indigenous philosophy of Krenak, with both writers making clear that to reimagine social relations one must also reconceptualise the earth beneath and the sky above, recognising the interconnected nature of all lives. Turning to a critical reading of Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out (1915), the essay concludes by demonstrating the insights such an approach can yield, bringing to light how the text pushes back against colonialist and imperialist fantasies of mastery and control and showing how Woolf instead endorses an ecological aesthetic of vibrance and vitality that extends far beyond the human.