A Billion Black Anthropocenes Or None

A Billion Black Anthropocenes Or None
Author: Kathryn Yusoff
Publisher:
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2018-11-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781517907532
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No geology is neutral. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, this book examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. The author initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between feminist black theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology.

Allegories of the Anthropocene

Allegories of the Anthropocene
Author: Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2019-06-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1478005580
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In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet
Author: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 734
Release: 2017-05-30
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1452954496
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Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth. As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication’s two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste—in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch. Contributors: Karen Barad, U of California, Santa Cruz; Kate Brown, U of Maryland, Baltimore; Carla Freccero, U of California, Santa Cruz; Peter Funch, Aarhus U; Scott F. Gilbert, Swarthmore College; Deborah M. Gordon, Stanford U; Donna J. Haraway, U of California, Santa Cruz; Andreas Hejnol, U of Bergen, Norway; Ursula K. Le Guin; Marianne Elisabeth Lien, U of Oslo; Andrew Mathews, U of California, Santa Cruz; Margaret McFall-Ngai, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Ingrid M. Parker, U of California, Santa Cruz; Mary Louise Pratt, NYU; Anne Pringle, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Deborah Bird Rose, U of New South Wales, Sydney; Dorion Sagan; Lesley Stern, U of California, San Diego; Jens-Christian Svenning, Aarhus U.

Becoming Human

Becoming Human
Author: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2020-05-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1479873624
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Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association Winner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association Winner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Argues that Blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically anti-Blackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of Blackness—the process of imagining the Black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of Blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."

The Anthrobscene

The Anthrobscene
Author: Jussi Parikka
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 61
Release: 2014-10-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452944008
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Smartphones, laptops, tablets, and e-readers all at one time held the promise of a more environmentally healthy world not dependent on paper and deforestation. The result of our ubiquitous digital lives is, as we see in The Anthrobscene, actually quite the opposite: not ecological health but an environmental wasteland, where media never die. Jussi Parikka critiques corporate and human desires as a geophysical force, analyzing the material side of the earth as essential for the existence of media and introducing the notion of an alternative deep time in which media live on in the layer of toxic waste we will leave behind as our geological legacy. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

The Conservation Revolution

The Conservation Revolution
Author: Bram Buscher
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2020-02-11
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1788737717
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A post-capitalist manifesto for conservation Conservation needs a revolution. This is the only way it can contribute to the drastic transformations needed to come to a truly sustainable model of development. The good news is that conservation is ready for revolution. Heated debates about the rise of the Anthropocene and the current ‘sixth extinction’ crisis demonstrate an urgent need and desire to move beyond mainstream approaches. Yet the conservation community is deeply divided over where to go from here. Some want to place ‘half earth’ into protected areas. Others want to move away from parks to focus on unexpected and ‘new’ natures. Many believe conservation requires full integration into capitalist production processes. Building a razor-sharp critique of current conservation proposals and their contradictions, Büscher and Fletcher argue that the Anthropocene challenge demands something bigger, better and bolder. Something truly revolutionary. They propose convivial conservation as the way forward. This approach goes beyond protected areas and faith in markets to incorporate the needs of humans and nonhumans within integrated and just landscapes. Theoretically astute and practically relevant, The Conservation Revolution offers a manifesto for conservation in the twenty-first century—a clarion call that cannot be ignored.

Strangers

Strangers
Author: Rebecca Tamás
Publisher: Makina Books
Total Pages: 107
Release: 2020-10-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1838436219
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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE In Strangers, Rebecca Tamás explores where the human and nonhuman meet, and why this delicate connection just might be the most important relationship of our times. From ‘On Watermelon’ to ‘On Grief’, Tamás’s essays are exhilarating to read in their radical and original exploration of the links between the environmental, the political, the folkloric and the historical. From thinking stones, to fairgrounds, from colliding planets to transformative cockroaches, Tamás’s lyrical perspective takes the reader on a journey between body, land and spirit—exploring a new ecological vision for our fractured, fragile world. Essays: On Watermelon • On Hospitality • On Panpscychism • On Greenness • On Pain • On Grief • On Mystery A fascinating, lyrical exploration of the eco-political, from human and non-human bodies to landscapes. Tamás’ essays are deeply rooted in folklore and the fragility of existence. A stunning work of enquiry and eloquence. —­­­ Sinéad Gleeson So full of insight, compassion and reason. – Anthony Anaxagorou Rebecca Tamás creates a shifting perspective in her essays which illuminates while giving unexpected pleasure. – Amit Chaudhuri Bursting with intellectual generosity. Deep wide roots and radical shoots. —­­­ Max Porter To read Rebecca Tamás is to feel weirdly, uncannily creaturely, and to see all around us as pulsing with meaning. —­­­ Katherine Angel Strangers is a much-needed lesson in how to love—unconditionally and immeasurably—a dying world. —­­­ Jessica J. Lee Erudite yet intimate, moving yet fierce, Rebecca Tamás’ hungry exploration of the world – occurring at the porous boundary between literary forms – made me rethink what it means to be humane. —­­­ Olivia Sudjic Rebecca Tamás writes searingly on loss, transformation, art and the body. Her writing is tender and sharp, brimming with heat. —­­­ Nina Mingya Powles Strangers is an extraordinary, essential book. Both quiet and loud. Strange yet explicit. —­­­ Sara Baume exciting and clear-eyed. —­­­ Melissa Harrison These essays are sharp, purposeful, moving and strange: necessary writing for now. —­­­ Jenn Ashworth ‘he writing in these essays is luminous and urgent, intensely intimate and wildly global. Strangers is an intricate exploration of environmental precarity, literary strangeness, and the importance of the nonhuman. —­­­ Naomi Booth Strangers is a work of generous, optimistic curiosity, one which forgoes the easy promise of a world to come and invites us instead into a relationship of charged “feral intimacy” with a world that is already here. —­­­ Sam Byers Tamás builds a world so intimate for us here, teaching us how to unlearn and relearn, relive and relove. – Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal This text is an echoing, unstoppable bell. – Caught by the River (book of the month) A passionate and poetic exercise in empathy for everything. – Between Two Books a beautiful exploration of our relationship with nature. – Idler intriguing and generous. – New Statesman The essays appear not as fragments but as portals, dropping deep into the currents of contemporary ecological thought and lived experience… – Amy Clarkson, SPAM

Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds

Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds
Author: Stephen Daniels
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2012-03-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1136883541
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The past decade has witnessed a remarkable resurgence in the intellectual interplay between geography and the humanities in both academic and public circles. The metaphors and concepts of geography now permeate literature, philosophy and the arts. Concepts such as space, place, landscape, mapping and territory have become pervasive as conceptual frameworks and core metaphors in recent publications by humanities scholars and well-known writers. Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds contains over twenty-five contributions from leading scholars who have engaged this vital intellectual project from various perspectives, both inside and outside of the field of geography. The book is divided into four sections representing different modes of examining the depth and complexity of human meaning invested in maps, attached to landscapes, and embedded in the spaces and places of modern life. The topics covered range widely and include interpretations of space, place, and landscape in literature and the visual arts, philosophical reflections on geographical knowledge, cultural imagination in scientific exploration and travel accounts, and expanded geographical understanding through digital and participatory methodologies. The clashing and blending of cultures caused by globalization and the new technologies that profoundly alter human environmental experience suggest new geographical narratives and representations that are explored here by a multidisciplinary group of authors. This book is essential reading for students, scholars, and interested general readers seeking to understand the new synergies and creative interplay emerging from this broad intellectual engagement with meaning and geographic experience.

Inhospitable World

Inhospitable World
Author: Jennifer Fay
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-03-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0190696796
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In recent years, environmental and human rights advocates have suggested that we have entered the first new geological epoch since the end of the ice age: the Anthropocene. In this new epoch, humans have come to reshape unwittingly both the climate and natural world; humankind has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluted the oceans, and irreversibly altered the atmosphere. Ironically, our efforts to make the planet more hospitable to ourselves seem to be driving us toward our inevitable extinction. A force of nature, humanity is now decentered as the agent of history. As Jennifer Fay argues, this new situation is to geological science what cinema has always been to human culture. Film, like the Anthropocene, is a product of the industrial revolution, but arises out of a desire to preserve life and master time and space. It also calls for the creation of artificial worlds, unnatural weather, and deadly environments for entertainment, scientific study, and devising military strategy. Filmmaking stages, quite literally, the process by which worlds and weather come into being and meaning, and it mimics the forces that are driving this new planetary inhospitality. Cinema, in other words, provides an image of "nature" in the age of its mechanical reproducability. Fay argues that cinema exemplifies the philosophical, political, and perhaps even logistical processes by which we can adapt to these forces and also imagine a world without humans in it. Whereas standard ecological criticism attends to the environmental crisis as an unraveling of our natural state, this book looks to film (from Buster Keaton, to Jia Zhangke, to films of atomic testing and early polar exploration) to consider how it reflects upon the creation and destruction of human environments. What are the implications of ecological inhospitality? What role might cinema and media theory play in challenging our presumed right to occupy and populate the world? As an art form, film enjoys a unique relationship to the material, elemental world it captures and produces. Through it, we may appreciate the ambitions to design an unhomely planet that may no longer accommodate us.

Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Author: Rob Nixon
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2011-06-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 067424799X
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“Groundbreaking in its call to reconsider our approach to the slow rhythm of time in the very concrete realms of environmental health and social justice.” —Wold Literature Today The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.