CONGOCENE. Congolese Cinema in / on / against the Anthropocene

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2022

The Anthropocene debate is here situated in the context of the environmental crisis. The polysemic nature and political implications of the concept are examined. The prefix Anthropos is discussed, especially in its historical connections to environmental injustice, racism, and specism. The concept of domestication is adopted as a heuristic tool to explore some of the colonial legacies that inspire contemporary ecological thinking and point to alternative ways of inhabiting the world, particularly those associated with multispecies ethnographies and Indigenous and Black diasporic ontologies. The core argument of this entry is that a productive decolonial perspective on the Anthropocene can operate as a reverse or counteranthropology of the contemporary condition, in which the present and the scientific attempts at making sense of it, through concepts such as the Anthropocene, are seen and evaluated from the fringes of the hierarchies of knowledge that structure modern science.

The negative effects of the colonial and modern project are becoming increasingly apparent each day. At the global scale, "the sixth extinction" is observable through the scars, disappearances, and deformations produced by colonial domination and the industrial pollution that is unevenly distributed across the planet. Algae blooms, or "red tides", and expanding plastic swirls materialize the accelerated warming of the oceans, currently measuring at the higher end of previous estimates. Such vast effects are most felt in their accumulative impact at the local level. For instance, Indigenous territories are left decimated in the wake of fracking, oil pipelines, damming, mining, and other forms of resource extraction. Steeped in polluted and unequal social ecologies, urban and rural communities of color disproportionately suffer exposure to toxicity and waste. In this slew of anthropogenic transformations, paying attention to the scale, decolonial mappings, embodiments, and experiences of violence for how we imagine beyond the colonial Anthropocene. This review essay uses the term colonial Anthropocene to attribute the source of vast damage and ruin. It reviews recent important books to argue for how we might perceive differently to remap and find sources of enlivened resurgence.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018

The universal discourse of the Anthropocene presents a global choice that establishes environmental collapse as the problem of the future. Yet in its desire for a green future, the threat of collapse forecloses the future as a site for creatively reimagining the social relations that led to the Anthropocene. Instead of examining structures like colonialism, environmental discourses tend to focus instead on the technological innovation of a green society that “will have been.” Through this vision, the Anthropocene functions as a geophysical justification of structures of colonialism in the services of a greener future. The case of the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement illustrates how this crisis of the future is sutured into mainstream environmentalism. Thus, both in the practices of “the environment in crisis” that are enabled by the Anthropocene and in the discourse of geological influence of the “human race,” colonial structures privilege whiteness in our environmental future. In t...

Course syllabus for HSHM 764: Decolonizing the Anthropocene (Program in the History of Science and Medicine, Yale, 2018)

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment

Coloniality, neoliberalism and the Anthropocene 1. <http://theconversation.com/7-5-billion-and-counting-how-many-humans-can-the-earthsupport-98797>. 2. K Arrow et al., 'Economic Growth, Carrying Capacity, and the Environment' (1995) 268 Science 520-21. 3. International Commission on Stratigraphy, 'Collapse of Civilizations Worldwide Defines Youngest Unit of the Geologic Time Scale'. Available at <http://www.stratigraphy.org/index. php/ics-news-and-meetings/119-collapse-of-civilizations-worldwide-defines-youngest-unit-ofthe-geologic-time-scale>. 4. See, for example, J Barber, Disciplinarity, Epistemic Friction and the 'Anthropocene'

Journal of Higher Education and Research Society: A Refereed International, 2022

This research article explores the evolving landscape of postcolonial studies in the context of environmental challenges. Drawing from the insights of prominent scholars like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty, it delves into the intersections of postcolonialism, environmentalism, and global capitalism. The article begins by examining how some postcolonialists have reevaluated their perspectives, prompted by the pressing issues posed by environmental studies. It discusses the critical work of environmental activist Vandana Shiva, who highlights the historical connection between colonialism and the destruction of ecological diversity. Furthermore, the article navigates the diverse opinions within feminist environmentalism regarding pre-colonial cultures. A significant portion of the article delves into the concept of "spatial amnesia" as outlined by Rob Nixon and the American wilderness obsession in environmental literature. It also addresses the reluctance of postcolonial criticism to engage with environmental questions. The research article emphasizes the importance of incorporating environmental issues within the postcolonial studies canon, highlighting the struggles of environmental activists in the third world against multinational corporations. Additionally, the article explores the concept of internal colonialism in the formally decolonized world and its links to the dynamics of global capitalism. It delves into Karl Marx's notion of primitive accumulation and Rosa Luxemburg's ideas on capitalism's reliance on non-capitalist social formations. Furthermore, it discusses accumulation by dispossession and its role in neoliberal development, along with recent movements like Occupy Wall Street that shed light on systemic inequalities. The article concludes by proposing a new universalism based on species thinking, emphasizing the need for a more comprehensive historical understanding in postcolonial studies. It underscores the interconnectedness of colonial legacies and contemporary global challenges, advocating for a postcolonial critique that extends beyond the boundaries of the Anglo-American academy.

Digital Press Social Sciences and Humanities

What is this thing called the Anthropocene? The Anthropocene is a strange thing. It is interesting conceptually, fascinating scientifically, and critically intriguing for our understanding when experiencing the borderless uncanny world-earth meeting. If an ontological uncanny of natural crisis time represents the promise of [M]odernity, which civilisation has altered nature, even colonised Earth into terra incognita circumstances and catastrophic possibilities simultaneously. The word ‘decolonisation’ of Anthropocene means ignoring the role of the world-colonialism system and creating the worlding conditions after modernity progress. However, the objections of the Anthropocene do not separate calamities based on ideology, political movement, social class, cultural local-wisdom, or even philosophical doctrine. In the eye of a geological epoch, human is being objects at the same time. For example, after the Great Acceleration event, people unconsciously produced a new planetary risk t...

This article argues for the importance of including Indigenous knowledges into contemporary discussions of the Anthropocene. We argue that a start date coincident with colonization of the Americas would more adequately open up these conversations. In this, we draw upon multiple Indigenous scholars who argue that the Anthropocene is not a new event, but is rather the continuation of practices of dispossession and genocide, coupled with a literal transformation of the environment, that have been at work for the last five hundred years. Further, the Anthropocene continues a logic of the universal which is structured to sever the relations between mind, body, and land. In dating the Anthropocene from the time of colonialization, the historical and ideological links between the events would 1 This paper was originally written in June, 2016 as the members of the Anthropocene Working Group were deciding upon the status and appropriate date for the proposed epoch. It was meant as an intervention into their decision-making process, in the hopes that they might place the 'golden spike,' or start date, at 1610. As such, a draft of this article was circulated amongst the Working Group members that summer. Although the Working Group's work has come to an end, the Anthropocene has not yet been officially adopted and the start date has yet to be decided upon. We hope that this article might serve as a continued intervention to show the political efficacy of placing the GSSP at 1610.

American Behavioral Scientist, 2014

At this particular historical conjuncture, human-made crises—from ecological disasters such as the BP oil spill or the Fukushima nuclear accident, to food shortages and national economic calamities—have rightly gained attention, and the prospect of real limits to consumption seem ever present on the horizon. According to David Harvey, such “[c]rises are moments of paradox and possibility out of which all manner of alternatives . . . can spring.” It is these moments, or encounters, of paradox and possibility that I address in this article. I specifically consider novel ecological political articulations that have emerged out of indigenous movements that unmask the material foundations of world history and demonstrate cracks in a dominant ideology that commoditizes all matter—living and otherwise.

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