The cene scene: Who gets to theorize global time and how do we center indigenous and black futurities?

Abstract

The Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Plantationocene are propositions for new ways of understanding the role of people on the planet. The theories hold that humans, capitalism, or the logica of plantation agriculture have so fundamentally reworked the world that we can demarcate these as new eras in the planet's history. In this article, we argue that these narratives privilege Eurocentric narratives of human history, failing to adequately engage Black and Indigenous scholarship and theorizations on the nature and origin of environmental change. We argue for scholars grappling with questions of environmental change to include Black and Indigenous scholarship, experience, and thought when theorizing new histories of the planet.

Cotton Monocultures and Reorganizing Socioecological Life in Telangana, India

“…Davis et al (2019) criticize plantationocene scholarship for obscuring racial politics and sidelining scholarship of the plantation from critical geography and Black feminist studies. Curley and Smith (2023) further stress that -cene narratives' pretension to global and universal stories fractures, claims, and colonizes time itself. Cotton in particular is inseparable from racial violence and colonization across time, an ongoing and issue and not a historical touchstone.…”

Desirable futures: Time as possibility, practice, politics

“…Time is racialized and colonized at different and intersecting scales -from whose time counts and whose time is wasted (Gupta, 2023;Joshi, 2023;Mahadeo, 2019;Vasudevan and Smith, 2020) to how global developmentalist narratives spatialize time, imagining places as backward or forward in time (Fagan, 2019;Mills, 2020;Rao, 2020) or in ruins and beyond repair (Dewan, 2021;Jackson, 2015;Paprocki, 2019). Colonial hierarchies are reproduced in how sweeps of time are codified into eras, determining when and how timelines end or begin (Curley and Smith, forthcoming;O'Brien, 2010;Rao, 2020;Whyte, 2021). Where O'Brien (2010) points to how Indigenous people are erased through being placed as the first people in place and also now disappeared through the figure of the "last" Native, Hunt (2018) observes the dearth of Native people in the future in science fiction (Whyte, 2018a; see also Curley and Lister, 2020;Davis and Todd, 2017).…”

“…Settler-enslaver epistemologies figure land and people as "potential property to further the interests of capital, state-making, and whiteness" (Curley et al, 2022: 4;Lowe, 2015); time too falls into the sights of this property-making colonial metaphysics. Time is a strategy used by the state and capital to discipline, coerce, and frame what is possible -from the management of minutes or even seconds in the workplace (Dimpfl, 2018), to the inscription of dominant time into the law (Joshi, 2023;Mills, 2014), from the structure of checkpoints and prisons which control and restructure time (Tawil-Souri, 2017), to the management of how we think of epochs, eras, or the future (Curley and Smith, forthcoming;Fagan, 2019;Whyte, 2021). Barra (2024) begins her article on "restoration otherwise," quoting Louisiana officials saying, "We have no time left to lose."…”

Keeping time with digital technologies: From real-time environments to forest futurisms

“…By examining the temporal structures and framings that organise and are organised by real-time forest technologies, we aim to offer an analysis of the real-time in relation to durational operations of coloniality in the context of environmental change. Anti-colonial and Indigenous knowledges highlight how dominant conceptions of time operate to overwrite other epistemologies and maintain formations of power, while also offering theories and practices for configuring time and temporal relationships differently (Curley and Smith, 2023). When 'the future is a territory to defend' (Futuros Ind ıgenas, 2021), we contend that a temporal analysis of how forests are technologically paced, measured, and experienced brings attention to patterns, contradictions, and slippages in the ways that forest techno-temporalities are co-produced, maintained, contested, and reimagined.…”