Month: August 2020

On decolonising the Anthropocene

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by Mark Jackson 

What follows is an overview of my paper, ‘On Decolonising the Anthropocene: disobedience via plural constitutions’ recently published in the journal Annals of the Association of American Geographers (doi: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1779645).

 A decolonial critique, the paper argues against how the Anthropocene overdetermines environmental politics. In place of increasingly assumed global environmental governance imaginaries, which mobilise under the aegis of emergency, but which also reproduce a status quo coloniality, the paper presents two pluriversal imaginaries, one from Afro-Caribbean historical geographies, another from Anishinaabe legal philosophy. Together they evidence enduring ecological reciprocities that unsettle and refuse the totalising narratives too often invoked by the Anthropocene.

[image] Jackson - On decolonising the Anthropocene blog post

[Left] Detail from ‘Emergence’ (c. 1999) by Haitian artist Frankétienne. [Centre] Earth Systems Governance research network. [Right] Detail from Children with the Tree of Life (c. 1980-1985) by Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau.

On decolonising the Anthropocene

Names are more than nouns. They are also verbs. Names build and summon relationships—familial, historical, cultural, axiological. Names tell stories. They are ways of remembering and valuing. Names, then, are narratives. And narratives matter.

Few narratives have swept across academic and popular imaginations with the speed and tenacity as ‘The Anthropocene’. From its storied nomination as a gruff rejoinder during a scientific meeting in Mexico in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, to its near ubiquity two decades later, the Anthropocene has quickly amassed an enormous body of scholarship and influence. This scholarship, now legion, and upon which careers, journals, research programs, and government policies depend, attends both to what ‘the Anthropocene’ names—geologically detectable, human induced, geo-physical change on a planetary scale—and how it names modern ‘ecocide’, the systematic killing of the life giving systems that sustain life.

Disagreements about the Anthropocene have, from the off, also been legion. These disputes have not been about ‘ecocide’ per se—only the most irrational and narcissistic of denialists contest that—but about when human induced harmful environmental change started, and who or what’s to blame. Questions debated are things like: has “…every human being, past and present…contributed to the present cycle of climate change” (p. 115), as the critic and novelist Amitav Ghosh argues in his book The Great Derangement (2016)? Or, are specific historical and geographical political and economic structures culpable, structures like capitalism and its social and environmental practices, and so humans as species, sui generis, are not at fault?

Many scholars have argued convincingly that, of course, not all humans are responsible for the ecocide that marks the planetary present. To suggest otherwise actually masks human difference behind a reductionist, naturalising veil that privileges a certain image of the human—white, male, North Atlantic, propertied, ‘developed’—as representative of species being. In fact, numerous human societies today, and in the past, extol forms of environmental responsibility that not only do not destroy their environments but enable complex interdependencies of managed flourishing and reciprocity. Most, indeed, don’t privilege the human as somehow separate from nature at all.

Considered closely, the Anthropocene is deeply colonial narrative. Generalising the cause of planetary ecocide as ‘Anthropos’ is racial, and, further, it blinkers the ability to see, learn from, and enact horizons of living differently constituted by other human lifeways.

Attending to pluriversal lifeways matters because the Anthropocene narrative currently overdetermines ecological imaginaries and environmental politics. It is offered first as a scientific truth claim, and, increasingly, it is also mobilised, politically, under the auspices of emergency. ‘We don’t have time to quibble about names and concepts!’, decry some. ‘We need to do something! We need immediate action at a global scale, led by global actors: nations, corporations, inter-governmental and transnational agencies. We need global earth systems governance!’ A decade ago, Paul Crutzen and colleague Christian Schwägerl wrote that the Anthropocene demands a new ‘global ethos’ of mastery. ‘We [i.e. humans] decide’, they wrote, ‘…what nature is and what it will be. To master this huge shift, we must change the way we perceive ourselves and our role in the world.”

To me, this hubris is worrying. I’m certainly not alone. Many critics contest the coloniality of the Anthropocene. We don’t need institutionalised mastery at a global scale. That’s the last thing we need. Similar hubris has led already to the present’s ecocidal conditions.

Many will scoff and patronise such criticisms with claims of naïveté and irrelevance. Undoubtedly, modern environmental harm does require immediate attention, but one of the great dangers in any response to a declared emergency is a certain unreflexive obedience, an obedience that takes the terms of engagement—the names and narratives—as given, which assumes they are natural, which doesn’t enquire about the relationships they seek to uphold and what work they do. Much harm has been done in the name of urgency, utility, and efficiency. Witness slavery, walls, holocausts, and pandemic power grabs.

What we need instead is more humility, humility to the ecological constitutions within which we have always already been a part. And, we also need to attend closely to the relationships between oppression and knowledge production.

Alternatives to what the Anthropocene over-determinines come from numerous worlds. As the famed development scholar, Arturo Escobar, writes in his new book Pluriversal Politics, ‘another possible is possible’ (2020, ix). The paper presents two possibles as ways of thinking ecological response to what the Anthropocene conditions.

The first is the example of plots. Plots were small gardens outside the global enclosures of plantations with which enslaved peoples grew food to sustain themselves. Plots, writes the cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, were soils where once peasants “transplanted all the structure of values that had been created by traditional societies of Africa, the land remained the Earth—and the Earth was a goddess” (1971, 100), which fed and sustained, and to whose constitution people returned in death. They were, literally, the marginal spaces that rooted time (ancestrality) and space (African homeland) through food and cultivation, and upon which the colonial architectures of oppression depended. As Wynter writes, they were affirmative ‘roots of culture’ (101).

Rootedness also articulates affirmative reciprocity within Indigenous legal constitutions, the second example suggested. Indigenous legal scholar, John Borrows, writes that the Anishinaabe word akinoomaagewin communicates an ‘earthbound’ sensibility of learning (2018: 66). From aki meaning ‘earth’ and noomaage meaning ‘to point towards and take direction from’, ‘…teaching and learning literally means the lessons we learn from looking to the earth…. The earth has a culture and we can learn from it.’ Grounding ‘earthway’ relations as the source of just living is referred to in the Anishinaabeg legal tradition as minobimaatisiwin. Minobimaatisiwin refers to the idea and virtue of living a good life. Minobimaatisiwin is an embodied relation of, as the Anishinaabe legal scholar and geographer Deborah McGregor writes, “reciprocal responsibilities and obligations that are to be met in order to ensure harmonious relations” (2018: 15). The ground of conceptual reflexivity here is a lived attention to earthbound care rather than an institutionalised governance that begins in epistemic politics which necessitate technicity or mastery. Fundamentally, care comes from the Earth and listening to it, rather than the assumed humanist (and Abrahamic) hubris that the Earth is mute and humans tend care to it. Nope. Flip it and now build your politics.

Indigenous and dispossessed peoples have been living with what the Anthropocene seeks to name for a very long time. Their struggles and survivals have depended on responding in affirmative and grounded ways to rooting relations. In most cases, they’ve listened to the Earth. Listening to how the Earth precedes and therefore anticipates the present planetary struggle might enable modern subjects to appreciate political possibilities other than globalised mastery.

Moderns don’t have to take the Anthropocene narrative for granted, as science or as politics. There are other narratives, and they also name other, life-affirming worlds of possibility.

Mark Jackson is Senior Lecturer of Postcolonial Geographies in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. m.jackson@bristol.ac.uk   

Reimagining the Pacific: Images of the Ocean in Chile and Peru, c.1960 to the Present

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Dr Paul Merchant, Lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture, writes about his new AHRC Leadership fellowship.

Coastal communities around the world are facing significant challenges, both ecological (such as rising sea temperatures) and as a consequence of human activity (for instance through flows of migration). Chile and Peru have been identified as two of the countries likely to be most affected by climate change, with their fishing industries vulnerable to rising sea temperatures, and their coastal regions vulnerable to the El Niño phenomenon, which is intensified by climate change. This project asks how visual and audiovisual creative responses to these and other issues from Chile and Peru can help us to live well in changing coastal environments across the world.

Scholars working in the environmental humanities and the emerging field of oceanic studies have argued that in order to develop a more sustainable relationship to the world’s oceans, we must understand the history and present of our responses to them. This project fills an important gap in this field of enquiry, which has to date paid little attention to the Pacific coast of South America and has remained focused on European and North American contexts. The project’s exploration of creative responses to ports as places of transnational encounter and exchange moreover responds to global concerns over how to adapt to increasing flows of migration. Coasts have long been viewed as spaces of exhibition and performance, where social change is particularly apparent, and while the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America has long been recognised as a hive of counter-culture and creativity, the diverse political traditions and cultures of Pacific ports such as Valparaíso and Callao have received far less attention.

Callao
The Port of Callao, Peru. Credit: Paul Merchant

Beginning in 1960, the date of a major earthquake and tsunami on the Chilean coast, this project asks how visual and audiovisual responses to the Pacific Ocean from Chile and Peru can shape a new critical understanding of how coastal communities respond to social and environmental pressures. The project analyses the production, reception and circulation of feature films (Patricio Guzmán, Javier Fuentes-León), video art (Cecilia Vicuña) and installations (Claudia Müller, Ana Teresa Barboza), among other forms of cultural production. It asks what changes are visible across the time period studied (1960 to the present), and shows how coastal cultural production brings to the surface lesser-known local, national and transnational histories.

How can scholars of audiovisual media produce critical work that supports public engagement with ecological issues?

The project also asks a methodological question: how can scholars of audiovisual media produce critical work that supports public engagement with ecological issues? This question is particularly important given the vital role that audiovisual media have played in recent years, whether in the form of television series or online video clips, in furthering public understanding of contemporary ecological challenges. One need only think of the influence of the BBC’s Blue Planet II series on debates around plastic use in the UK.

The project’s findings will be disseminated through several major scholarly publications, including a monograph with a leading university press and a methodological article in a leading peer-reviewed environmental humanities journal. A Post-Doctoral Research Assistant will be recruited, and they will publish an article in a major peer-reviewed Latin American studies journal.

In addition to these academic outputs, I will hold stakeholder workshops with local arts organisations and representatives of environmental NGOs in Chile and Peru. I will work with the Project Partner, the Centre for Cinema and Creation in Santiago de Chile, to develop the format of these workshops and to disseminate outcomes. Discussions at these events, along with a symposium on ecomedia and audiovisual research methods to be held in Bristol, will inform the design of a project website on which to disseminate examples of the material studied, and critical responses to it.

 

PM AHRC postDr Paul Merchant is lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Latin American film and visual culture, with particular emphasis on the countries of the Southern Cone and, more recently, Peru and Bolivia. He has recently completed his first book, Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015.

Dark-dwellers as more-than-human misfits: a new synthesis of disability studies, environmental history and histories of human-animal relations

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Dr Andy Flack, lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies, writes about his new AHRC Leadership Fellowship project.

There are at least a billion people on this planet today who are directly affected by disability, and many more besides when their families, friends, and colleagues are taken into consideration. Disability – and the structures that create it – really matters. It may be marginalized, but it is hardly a minority experience. As disability studies scholars have compellingly illustrated, the concept of disability is underpinned by a range of assumptions about the form and function of bodies – the ‘normal’, ‘able’, and their opposites – and the world these ‘misfitting’ bodies inhabit. Such assumptions are always a matter of perspective and they have histories of their own. They reflect value systems which, historically, have had profound material effects, generating and entrenching maginalisation.

This project investigates whether these historically contingent value systems transcend the human world and proposes that historians need to pay attention to the broadest application of concepts relating to disability such as ‘ability’, ‘normativity’, ‘vulnerability’ and ‘adaptation’ and to the material impacts of such classifications on bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. They need to understand how dominant groups – in this case human beings – imagined and dealt with all kinds of ‘differently-abled’, bodies that appeared to inhabit the world in strange and incongruous ways. In sum, they need to ask new questions of the past in order to better understand the discursive foundations of disability as an imposed identity and the allied impacts of those systems on living beings.

Through this leadership fellowship I will develop an agenda for future interrogations of disability’s intersection with environmental history and histories of human-animal relations. To do this, this project focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and North American natural history discourses relating to animals adapted to living and seeing in the dark. These are the creatures who spend most of their lives beyond our sight and living in ways that we struggle to comprehend. The period 1840-2000 captures key moments in the emergence and development of natural historical knowledge relating to these kinds of animals. Indeed, over its course, there have been far-reaching transformations, not only in the imagination and classification of diverse bodies but also in terms of human impacts on their shrouded worlds. Their strange, perplexing, non-normative bodies were frequently branded as ‘broken’, ‘degenerate’, or, indeed, ‘super’; attitudes that reveal changing norms and transforming valuations of ability and judgements about what it means to be ‘normal’.

adam-bixby-pLsphJKrAkk-unsplash
Image: Adam Bixby via unsplash

 

Animals living in the world’s darkest environments, from deep underground to the oceanic abyss, were imagined in the British and North American contexts – and across both scientific and popular contexts – as extreme others, inhabiting the margins of the world and knowing it in ways which rendered them ‘non-normative’, often ‘extraordinary’, beings whose otherness made them enchanting, even seemingly other-worldly. Such ‘differently-abled’ others were subjected to an array of assumptions and, later, wide ranging studies aimed at understanding how their bodies worked and how they survived and flourished in their dark worlds.

Conceptualizations of echolocating bats are an illustrative case in point. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, natural philosophers sought to understand the ‘otherworldly’ nighttime navigations of these creatures via gruesome laboratory experiments on their perplexing bodies. Torturing many hundreds of bats, eyes were gouged out with red hot needles and ears blocked with starch before their capacity to navigate in the dark was put to the test to identify and understand their ‘special’ sensory abilities. Such an interrogation of bat sensory capacity broke with an historical tradition of dismissing the creatures as quite literally blind, even ‘broken’; Natural history writer Thomas Bewick’s view at the end of the eighteenth century was that bats were, in consequence, ‘imperfect’ animals.

[image2] AF AHRC post
from Thomas Bewick’s A general history of quadrupeds (1824) via Biodiversity Heritage Library

Narratives of deficiency and exceptionalism characterise historical British and North American comprehensions, not only of echolocating bats, but also of many dark-dwelling species. By the middle of the twentieth century, as the senses required for life in the dark had become better understood – including Donald Griffin’s detection of bat echolocation in 1938 – dark-dwellers had been drawn from the margins towards the mainstream of British and North American comprehensions of nature’s diversity. At the same time, however, and perhaps ironically, writers across scientific and popular publications began noting that many of these creatures were becoming increasingly marginalised by the anthropogenic environmental transformations of modernity, including the illumination of darkness, the construction of transport infrastructures and, most recently, the cascading effects of climate change. Consequently, the imagination of these animals transformed: they came to be construed not only as ‘differently-abled’, but also as ‘vulnerable’, ‘adaptable’, and ‘resilient’. Such adjectives are profoundly familiar to people living with disability in the world today.

In building a history of difference through a case study that transcends an exclusively human world, this highly innovative research project places the nonhuman world at the heart of an analytical framework and historical methodology that excavates familiar source materials for the wide-ranging discursive structures that underpin the modern concept of disability:  ability, normalcy, vulnerability and adaptation.

The resulting ‘beyond-the-human’ reconceptualization of the meaning of these categories widens historical appreciation of the discourses that generate and perpetuate disability. In the process, I will produce a suite of publications that enable me to set a stimulating agenda for further research. Crucially, I will also ask challenging questions about how this research might apply to diverse communities beyond the academy. Through the development of innovative impact activities focused on key stakeholders – Key Stage 2 children, teachers, sight-impaired individuals and vision clinicians – I seek to transform understandings of diversity, ability, and disability in important and radical ways.

 

[image1] AF AHRC postDr Andy Flack is a lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol. He is an animal and environmental historian, working primarily on human engagements with the non-human animal world across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His first book, The Wild Within: Histories of a Landmark British Zoo was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2018.

 

Header image: Clément Falize via unsplash