Gender Abolition and Ecotone War

Abstract

This essay begins with two examples where certain precapitalist material entanglements were taken up and transformed by capital. One is the Hawaiian creation chant, the Kumulipo, and the complicated ecotones that define that poem. The other is gender. Neither ecotones nor the gender distinction arise with capitalism, but capitalism has been spectacularly successful in using both toward its own ends. From there the essay argues that the ecological crisis is a single crisis of capitalist accumulation that develops over time and appears differently in different moments, and any opposition to crisis capitalism (which is to say, capitalism tout court) must turn to synthesize the problematics of ecology and feminism at the level of the whole. The particular transformation in which we are interested concerns the remaking of an aggregate arrangement, various and elaborated and tending toward a whole, into a systematic differential purpose-built to accumulate capital. We argue that the tracing of this history will lead us not merely toward a useful sense of how we date the Anthropocene but toward a politics adequate to the present and an idea of where to intervene.

Romantic Ecocriticism Lately

“…It would lay the ground with Jonathan Bate and tarry with Timothy Morton, beginning with his 1994 study of Percy Shelley's vegetarianism before moving on to Ecology Without Nature , The Ecological Thought , Hyperobjects , etc. It would weigh narratives and counternarratives of the Anthropocene by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jason W. Moore, Andreas Malm, Donna Haraway, and others and set them alongside Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr's bracing declaration of “ecotone war.” It would certainly give impassioned credit to the pathbreaking labors of Alan Bewell, whose Natures in Translation I take up below, and his book on Romanticism and Colonial Disease (1999).…”