© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/15685241-12341469 Kronoscope 20 (2020) 215-238 brill.com/kron Postcolonial Lithographies Stones, Deep Time and Literary Narrative in the Anthropocene Amit R. Baishya Department of English, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA arbaishya1@ou.edu Abstract This article explores how considerations of deep time—not just deep human histories, but inhuman ones as well—can help us re-evaluate postcolonial literary works in the wake of the Anthropocene. I focus on the representation of “lithic time” through a read- ing of the Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Slave Old Man. Chamoiseau’s novel has had some traction in animal studies recently because of his conjoined por- trayal of the mutual degradation and eventual enslavement of a human and a dog in a colonial plantation in Martinique. I argue, however, that a consideration of stones and lithic time in the novel facilitates a push beyond the located aspects of interspe- cies relationships and opens portals to contemplations of the inhuman dimensions of geohistorical time. This article looks at the inhuman temporal dimensions of stone in Chamoiseau’s novel, while simultaneously reflecting on how a deep time perspective can assist us in reconceptualizing postcolonial literary analytical strategies. Keywords Anthropocene – deep time – lithic time – planetarity – plantation – interspecies – postcolonial Nissim Ezekiel, the Anglophone Indian poet, writes in his lyric “The Stone:”1 1 Nissim Ezekiel, “The Stone,” in Nissim Ezekiel: Selected Poems (Second Edition) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 40.