On Decolonizing the Anthropocene: Disobedience via Plural Constitutions

Abstract

This paper mobilises a decolonial critique of the Anthropocene. It argues for a certain epistemic disobedience to what, conceptually and politically, the Anthropocene seeks to legitimate. The paper counterposes recent critical and global governance epistemologies, which summon the Anthropocene as a new humanist and statist moment for universal politics, against plural, parochial forms of relational, non-statist affirmation. Hegemonic governance imaginaries that invoke universalist and naturalising rationales are shown to reproduce colonial logics. The paper argues for marginalised and systematically ignored forms of earth-bound relationality that evidence long-standing political and ontological means for responding to modernity's ecological and social harms. Earthbound and rooted life-worlds can affirm ecological responsibility and co-constitution otherwise. Two examples are presented, one from Afro-Caribbean geographies, another from Anishinaabe legal scholarship. Together they evidence enduring ecological reciprocities that unsettle and refuse the totalising rationalities invoked by Anthropocene horizons.

Enacting small justices: Education, place and subjectivity in the Anthropocene

“…This would mean attending to the particularness (including histories of settler colonialism) of a place as well as experimenting with how marginalised and indigenous philosophies of existential interconnectivity in such places could potentially inform practicing an affirmative politics of subjectivity (cf. Acosta & Abarca, 2018; Bignall et al., 2016; Jackson, 2020; Le Grange, 2012).…”

“…This is the case since the European colonisation of the Americas signals when ‘humanity was borne as an exclusionary construct’ (Yusoff, 2019, p. 53) given that it emerged from the oppression, enslavement and genocide of those communities racialised as Indigenous and black (cf. Jackson, 2020). Aimé Césaire (2000, p. 21) aptly puts it as ‘colonisation = “thingification”’ since through colonisation ‘societies [were] drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out’.…”

“…Thus, we have to remain attentive to the potential spatial and temporal universalisation of the Anthropocene by giving recognition to the ‘“already here” worlds’ through attending to the plurality of knowledges that emerge from the constitutive webs of life found, both historically and presently, in in‐place (cf. Jackson, 2020, p. 3). Interrogating the social practices and the unfolding of place in relation to power would necessarily entail considering the subjectivities these relationships make possible and (re)produce.…”

An Arkansas Parable for the Anthropocene

“…For Tsing (2017, 61), the history of landscape is not a singular narrative but an intersecting set of processes that pitches efforts to protect existing ecologies against the "approaching unlivability" of the Anthropocene. The surge of interest in the Anthropocene presents not a new perspective but a radical reassertion of dominant scientific narratives along with existing modes of cultural representation (see, e.g., Demos 2017;Yusoff 2018;Karera 2019;Jackson 2021). The contemporary emphasis on greater control over nature under the bio-and terraforming logic of the "adaptive Anthropocene" marks a perpetuation or even enhancement of existing power relations.…”

Geography and ethics I: Placing injustice in the Anthropocene

“…These critiques press against claims of 'incommensurability' in the Anthropocene by showing it to be more an outcome of chronic conditions than the onset of acute crises. In response, Jackson (2021) argues for geographies of 'epistemic disobedience' that dissent from the Anthropocene as a product of, and tacit apology for, conditions wrought by colonialism. Yusoff (2019) argues geologic time is itself deeply racialised owing to the social practices of geosciences.…”