Introduction

Abstract

This introduction lays out the major questions of the book and the major concepts that guide its arguments. First and foremost is the concept of tending, which I theorize as capaciously including at least four different registers: (1) the material endurance of worlds as tendencies in the patterning of matter (I call this “evental ontogenesis”); (2) questions of attention, attunement, and perception; (3) the question of care and cultivation; and finally, (4) matters of waiting, anticipation, speculation. Through the concept of homogenization, and in particular its grammatical forms, I explore how enlightenment coloniality names a tending of world (singular), and I look to decolonial theories of pluriversality and work on the abolition of Man (in Sylvia Wynter's sense) to think about otherwise tendings I associate with “endarkenment.”