Ends of worlds or the continuation of the planet? Postcolonial theory, the Anthropocene, and the nonhuman

Set in the near future, the Australian novelist James Bradley’s cli-fi Clade closes with a description of natural illuminations named ‘the Shimmer’:

They have a proper name … but most people call them the Shimmer. Nobody knows what is causing them: the best guess of most scientists is that they are related to a new instability in the Earth’s magnetic fields, an instability that may presage the poles flipping from north to south, as they have occasionally in the distant past, although why that should be happening now is unclear. Some argue that it is a natural phenomenon. But there are also those who believe the process has been hastened by the events of the last century, claiming that the incremental changes to the Earth’s rotation caused by the melting of ice and the shifting of the crust as it adapted to its loss have destabilized the fields in new and unpredictable ways.¹

This paragraph is an apt depiction of the paradox of the Anthropocene – the influential, yet contested and controversial name for the geological epoch where the human species has transformed into a planetary geobiochemical force.² On the one hand, the narrator names anthropogenic activity as one of the causes for a shift in the earth’s crust, ratifying the consensus that Homo sapiens has emerged as a geobiochemical force that has left or will leave an indelible mark on the planetary system, as illustrated in recent critical discourses on the Plasticene or on technofossils.³ On the other hand, the phrase – ‘nobody knows what is causing them’ – also reveals the constitutive otherness of the planet – its unpredictable, contingent operations that escape any attempt at conscious human control. Gayatri Spivak calls this planetarity – the ‘planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan’.⁴ Spivak contrasts this with the globe – ‘the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere’.⁵ To be ‘on loan’ predicates a gift-relation that the human enters with the planet.⁶ To imagine ourselves as ‘planetary subjects’ instead of ‘global agents’, Spivak posits, means that ‘alterity remains underived from us’.⁷ This statement places humans as a contingent, and not the dominant, force on a planet that is essentially unheimlich. The human species conceptualized as homo deus as opposed to the human species existing precariously along with other species and life-forms on an unheimlich planet. This paradox of simultaneous sovereignty and vulnerability characterizes the Anthropocene.

Our mode of thinking with this double bind in this introduction to this special issue titled ‘Planetary Solidarities: Postcolonial Theory, the Anthropocene and the Nonhuman’ draws on the works of postcolonial ecocritics, decolonial and critical race studies scholars, indigenous thought and literary narratives that open us up to possibilities of survival and cohabitation with nonhumans in the Anthropocene. Although this issue contains essays from multiple disciplines, for us literary narratives enable apprehensions of otherness (human, nonhuman and inhuman) and facilitate encounters with alterity. Our argument about the salience of the literary in thinking about ways of dwelling and co-dwelling with humans, nonhumans and the inhuman in the Anthropocene resonates with Derek Attridge’s arguments about the ethical dimensions of the writing, reading and criticism of literature. He argues that ‘literature as art involves a particular kind of experience that, although taking a host of different forms, can be characterized summarily as an opening to otherness'.⁸ Identifying three dimensions of the experience of literariness – otherness, inventiveness and singularity – he posits otherness or alterity, specifically as a ‘dimension of the literary experience that manifests itself as surprise or unfamiliarity, whether massive or minimal … ’.⁹ This is a useful pathway for contending with how literary narratives evidence planetary thinking at multiple spatio-temporal scales.

We begin though by identifying three trajectories that have emerged in response to this double bind of the Anthropocene from the allied yet also diverging fields of postcolonial and decolonial studies: discussions around dating the Anthropocene epoch, the critique of the undifferentiated human subject of the Anthropocene, and the nonanthropocentric challenge that the Anthropocene poses to epistemological systems. The first two trajectories are critiques of monohumanist accounts, while the third one makes moves towards displacing the centrality of the human. Once we complete this tripartite cognitive mapping, we turn to considerations of survival and dwelling in symbiotic ways in the Anthropocene for humans and nonhumans.

For the humanistic and social scientific disciplines, the Anthropocene and its much-debated golden spike events revealed different stories about the impact of Homo sapiens on the planet: ‘Each start date redefines the narrative, its eponymous agent – the anthropos as agriculturalist, conquistador, inventor, capitalist, cyborg – and thus the shape and potential outcomes of the story.’¹⁰ Most of these start dates have also led to vigorous critiques by postcolonial and decolonial theorists. For the sake of economy and convenience, let’s focus only on the ‘Great Acceleration’ of the 1950s. In an interview, decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter discusses a 2007 report in Time magazine on global warming:

… global warming is a result of human activities; and, … this problem began in about 1750 but accelerated from about 1950 onward … What happened by 1950? … The majority of the world’s peoples who had been colonial subjects … had now become politically independent. At that time, we who, after our respective anticolonial uprisings, were almost all now subjects of postcolonial nations, nevertheless fell into the mimetic trap of … ‘collective Bovaryism’ – because the West is now going to reincorporate us neocolonially, and thereby mimetically, by telling us that the problem with us wasn’t that we’d been imperially subordinated, wasn’t that we’d been both socioculturally dominated and economically exploited, but that we were underdeveloped. The West said: ‘Oh, well, no longer be a native but come and be Man like us! Become homo oeconomicus!’¹¹

This isn’t the same as saying that the Global North is more complicit in deleterious anthropogenic changes to the earth-system (which it is). Instead, Wynter’s critique hinges on two related nodes: (i) the ‘Great Acceleration’ coincided with the period of decolonization and the attempts towards modernist development in formerly colonized nations, and (ii) subsequent to independence, the postcolonial elites fell into a ‘mimetic trap’ and overinvested in a monohumanist genre of the human, no longer ‘native’ but ‘Man’ as homo oeconomicus. This is evident in the continuing fetishization of technocratic discourses of ‘national development’ in many nations in the Global South. In a statement that summarizes what is at the core of racial colonial-capitalism and its mimetic epigones among elitist projects in the Global South, Kathryn Yusoff writes: ‘At the heart of that racial formation was the extractive impulse, which builds capitalism into a globally functioning system that is world-altering.’¹²An overinvestment in this monohumanist narrative both in the Global North and in the many Norths in the Global South, leads to a ‘disproportionate using up of the planet’s capacity to regulate itself within the biophysical parameters that support human life (and is) … a borrowing against – even theft of – other people’s futures’.¹³ The overrepresentation of the homo oeconomicus as the only genre of the human is the problem, as if we lack imaginative possibilities for surviving and existing other-wise in ways that depart from this monohumanist narrative. In contrast, imagining multiple imaginaries of ‘otherwise worlds’ has been one of the fundamental tasks of postcolonial and decolonial thought.¹⁴ A famous early illustration is Frantz Fanon’s call in The Wretched of the Earth: ‘For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.’¹⁵ Unearthing multiple genres of the human as arts of living in an increasingly damaged planet, instead of repeating melancholic paeans on learning to die in the Anthropocene is one of the central tasks of this issue.¹⁶

One major monohumanist narrative consolidated in the last couple of decades is the dominant way in which the stories of the Anthropocene epoch have been told/recounted with an undifferentiated human subject at the centre, now conceptualized in terms of a species universalism. This is present in the foundational works of Paul Crutzen and Jan Zalaciewicz and has an afterlife even in the works of postcolonial thinkers like Dipesh Chakrabarty.¹⁷ The postcolonial critique of this monohumanist narrative paradigm provincializes and pluralizes the putatively universal species subject. Postcolonial thinkers have often criticized the erasure of difference in Anthropocene species-universalism, highlighting the need for recognizing racial, economic and historical inequities. Scholars like Francoise Verges and Katharine McCrittrick have adapted other critical alternatives that have emerged such as ‘Capitalocene’ or ‘Plantationocene’ respectively, but also critiqued their erasure of race and colonialism in these theorizations.¹⁸ Consider two recent attempts to propose alternatives to the species universalism of the Anthropocene: the theorist of international relations, Jairus Victor Grove’s ‘Eurocene’ and the East Asian historian Mark W. Driscoll’s ‘Climate Caucasianism.’¹⁹ Geopolitics, for Grove, ‘persists as the primary operating system of planetary life’. Yet, he emphasizes, a look back at the last five hundred years of human history reveals that the geo in politics is ‘a European-led global project of rendering … (that) is the driver of our epoch and the obstacle to any other version of our world, whether plural or differently unified’. To make ‘ecological sense’ of ‘five hundred years of geopolitics and its warlike means’, Grove coins the term Eurocene – the ‘consequences of a geopolitical form of life [that] vary from settler colonial genocide to environmental massacre to strategic interventions into the very rhythms and synaptic terrains of individual human bodies’.²⁰

East Asian historian Driscoll borrows the Qing official, Lin Zexu’s (also a major figure in the last two books of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy) 1839 statement – ‘Whites are the enemies of Heaven’ – to replace the unmarked humanity (anthropos) in Anthropocene with Climate Caucasianism and Colonialism.²¹ With these two terms he names a ‘raceological’ formation that focuses on a ‘capitalist logic centered on extraction (of nonwhite humans and most women, nonliving fossils, living, extrahuman nature, rent, data …) and an epistemic logic of … “extra-action” – the domination of “inferior” humans and nonliving extractables from outside and above’.²² The two key historical events Driscoll focuses on are the two Opium wars with China (1839-60) and the US gunboat invasion of Tokugawa Japan (1853-54). Both Grove and Driscoll’s arguments share elective affinities with a comment made by Amitav Ghosh in Gun Island: ‘Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known … ’.²³ Indeed, this focus on ‘planetary remaking’ and particular modes of organizing human societies puts the focus on the current crises engulfing us (whether it’s the climate crisis, the sixth great extinction event, the refugee crisis or the spectres of war) squarely in the court of colonialism and capitalism.²⁴ Colonialism and capitalism have remade the planet drastically and pushed us towards the crises we are beset with today. Instead, of an undifferentiated anthropos, a particular section of the human species that benefited historically from colonialism and capitalism are at the root of the Anthropocene crisis.

Although we agree broadly with the critiques of the undifferentiated anthropos in these critiques of monohumanist narratives, we continue to use the term Anthropocene because, as a geophysical stratigraphic marker, the term encompasses a lot more than just the globalizing histories of colonialism and capitalism. As stated by environmental historian Nancy Langston (and we are in agreement) ‘the concept of the Anthropocene still does useful work for us, because it helps us focus our gaze on the enormity of the disruptions challenging life on Earth'.²⁵ As opposed to the planetary remaking alluded to by Ghosh – which is a vital part of the Anthropocene – our emphasis is on planetarity and planetary solidarities. Planetarity, through which we reimagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than as global agents, is an injunction to train our imaginations other-wise for an ‘encounter with the impossible’.²⁶

Here is a passage from Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha’ that uses the urban, bourgeois character Puran’s encounter with the ‘impossible’ figure of the pterodactyl to contemplate times without ‘us’:

You are moveless with your wings folded, I do not wish to touch you, you are outside my wisdom, reason, and feelings, who can place his hand on the axial moment of the end of the third phase of the Mesozoic and the beginnings of the Kenozoic geological ages? That is the story of seventy-five million years … . Have you left the pages of some picture book, taken shape so that you can give some urgent news to today’s humans, have you come here because Pirtha (the village in Central India that is the primary setting of the story) is also endangered, its existence under attack for other kinds of reasons?²⁷

The encounter with the impossible figure of the pterodactyl, a figure that precedes ‘us’ and yet makes an ethical demand upon us, impels Puran to attempt to imagine a massive, abyssal scale of deep time, which then leads him to a contemplation of the bleed between species and cultural extinction. This encounter with deep time is also a training of Puran’s planetary imagination – imaginative and ethical encounters with radical difference – as opposed to the planetary remaking – forcibly and violently rearranging the planet into versions of sameness – engendered by colonialism and capitalism. Retraining the planetary imagination through modes of multiscalar thinking – both in terms of time and space – is the task incumbent upon us as we seek envision ways of living otherwise

Rethinking questions about empire, capital and colony through the multiscalar lenses that the Anthropocene asks us to adopt is also at the heart of the nonathropocentric models championed by two major postcolonial critics: Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ian Baucom. Both historians are essentially concerned with questions of epistemology, especially multiscalar and heterotemporal methodologies, in the wake of the Anthropocene. Chakrabarty’s theses, developed in a series of essays, have been critiqued, as we alluded to earlier, for its species-universalism and its implicit monohumanism, an admittedly massive shift for a thinker of difference and plurality who once attempted a project at ‘Provincializing Europe’.²⁸ However, to be fair, Chakrabarty’s species-universalism does not emerge from the ‘capacity to experience a world’ but from a ‘shared sense of catastrophe’.²⁹ This is a form of ‘negative universal history’, one that is predicated more on being-in-common that is shaped by a sense of catastrophe, more than any ontological verity of common being.³⁰ His formulation is not a metaphysical, but a nonontological portrayal of the human species that undercuts the centrality of undifferentiated humanity undergirding certain grand narratives of the Anthropocene. Chakrabarty repeatedly emphasizes the importance of these nonontological heuristic frames; however, he simultaneously says that the Anthropocene challenges us to ‘scale up our view of the human’.³¹ The challenge of the Anthropocene is that ‘the story of our necessarily divided human lives … (have) … to be supplemented by the story of our collective life as a species, a dominant species, on the planet’.³² To call for categories that extend and supplement the habits and horizons of thought – a challenge that the Anthropocene poses for us – is not the same as to call earlier heuristic frames ‘obsolete’. Instead, it calls for a stretching and re-adaptation of critical terms and thinking across multiple scales. The challenge here is to think the ‘globe’ in globalization – a concept that anthropocentrically puts humans at the centre – and the planet in ‘planetarity’ – the ‘subject-destabilizing unhomeliness (unheimlich) of the planet’³³ – simultaneously.

Chakrabarty takes Spivak’s Levinasian category of planetarity and provides it with a specific twist emerging from his engagements with Earth System Sciences (ESS) and ‘comparative planetary studies’ (both James Lovelock, of Gaia fame, and Jan Zalaciewicz began as planetary comparativists).³⁴ As he writes:

… the harder we work the earth in our increasing quest for profit and power, the more we encounter the planet. Planet emerged from the project of globalization, from ‘destruction’ and the futile project of human mastery … Yet it is neither the globe nor the world and definitely not the earth. It belongs to a domain where this planet reveals itself as an object of astronomical and geological studies and as a very special case containing the history of life – all of these dimensions vastly out-scaling human realities of space and time.³⁵

Chakrabarty is at his most Spivakian when he says that we are ‘passing guests’ rather than ‘possessive hosts’ of the planet.³⁶ This point is encapsulated powerfully in the Urdu writer, Intizar Hussain’s novel Basti:

The world … is a guest-house. We and our desires are guests in it … Whatever the earth deigns to bestow on us guests, it’s a favor, and the earth has shown us great kindness indeed … Guard this trust, and remember the kindness shown by the earth we left … ³⁷

In contrast to this gift-relationship one shares with the planet, the concept of the global operates by putting the human at the centre of things – its collective subject is ‘humanity’ (encapsulated by the Latin term homo). It is, thus, willy-nilly an anthropocentric narrative. The anthropos utilized by geologists and scientists, a conceptualization that recasts the human species at the level of nonhuman forces, gestures in a different direction. The anthropos ‘invites us to see humans on an expanded canvas of history, spanning the geological history of the planet and the story of life on it’.³⁸ Indeed, by recasting the human species as a nonhuman force, the concept of the Anthropocene has a radically decentring aspect, as the ‘human’ is recast as one force among many in a long chain impacting the volatile earth-system which preexists any notion of human collectivity and history by eons. The word ‘life’ is key here and Chakrabarty uses it more in the Arendtian/Agambenian sense of zoe (pure natural life) rather than bios (qualified life). No wonder then that opposed to a homocentric politics of globalization, Chakrabarty’s messianic call for a politics to come in the Anthropocene is termed ‘zoecentrism’.

Chakrabarty’s arguments are extended further by the historian of transatlantic slavery, Ian Baucom. Climate change (note the narrowing of the Anthropocene to this counter), Baucom argues, ‘demands a fundamental reformulation of postcolonial studies’ grounding interpretive protocols: its anti-universalism, its tendency to maintain a distinction between ‘human’ and ‘natural history, and its prioritization of cultural difference over humanity’s collective “species” being’.³⁹ The newly emergent science of the Anthropocene impels us to read the history of the terms modern and modernity with natural history in the background.⁴⁰ In front of the Anthropocene challenge, both aesthetic experience and historical epistemology, he argues, have to rescale its images of the human and of human life which must now be distributed across:

… this range of temporal scales and ontological registers; what it means for the human to be, simultaneously, a bearer of rights, a subject of cultural difference, an expression of co-evolutionary deep time, a geophysical force, and a measure of the infinite; what it means to pose the question of freedom from within these multiple ‘situations’ of human and nonhuman life – serially, and all at once.⁴¹

Any notion of historical totality in the Anthropocene epoch has to take into account ‘scale-bending, scale-jumping heterogeny’.

Besides the species universalism, the oftentimes narrow identification of Anthropocene with global warming in such works has been interrogated by a range of thinkers, from historian Julia Adeney Thomas to literary critic, Jennifer Wenzel. They emphasize that the Anthropocene is not reducible to global warming, although it is certainly one of its primary aspects.⁴² The Anthropocene ‘involves multiple, human-induced changes to the Earth system resulting from rearrangements of molecules and life forms across the planet, associated with the burning of wood and fossil fuels, industrial chemistry, planned and accidental discharges of nuclear material, and global trade and migration’.⁴³ Some of these aspects can be reasonably controlled by humans, others, as our opening quotation from Clade illustrates, not quite so, as any impact on the earth-system may have unprecedented and unpredictable side-effects. But the key point is that the Anthropocene has multiple dimensions instead of being limited only to anthropogenically induced global warming.

Furthermore, Chakrabarty and Baucom’s exclusive focus on global warming risks admitting a different kind of anthropocentrism through the back door. By focusing on global warming, Chakrabarty, despite his advocacy for zoecentrism, seems to be ‘disproportionately concerned with the survival of our own species’.⁴⁴ Both Chakrabarty and Baucom are cognizant of the danger posed by global warming to other species, but since the burden falls disproportionately in favour of the self-preservation of our species, Shital Pravinchandra is correct in emphasizing that Chakrabarty asks us to recognize ‘our’ vulnerability to climate change as a means of protecting ourselves, instead of embracing a more radical possibility immanent in postcolonial theory and literature – how we ‘recognize, accept and embrace our vulnerability’.⁴⁵ While Chakrabarty’s work, especially, asks us to take the imaginative and epistemological leap to conceptualize ourselves as a nonhuman force, the bulk of his thinking proceeds without adequately considering our shared vulnerabilities with other nonhuman species. ‘Life’ becomes narrowly identified with forms of human life.

As varieties of nonanthropocentric forms of thought – decoloniality, posthumanisms, vital materialisms, multispecies ethnography among others – have taught us, humans are co-constituted by numerous nonhuman and inhuman others. Dualist divisions between humans and nonhumans, life and nonlife have become increasingly untenable in the Anthropocene epoch.⁴⁶ In keeping with the possibilities of co-dwelling and co-constitution with nonhuman and inhuman others in the Anthropocene, we suggest that the Anthropocene be considered as a modality of postcolonial science fiction. Postcolonial science fiction, for us, is less a placeholder for a specific genre than a subjunctive ‘mode of relation’ to the future predicated on the question of survival in the present culled from modes of experience drawing from the past.⁴⁷ While the contiguities between Anthropocene discourse and science fiction, especially it’s futuristic dimensions that have merged frighteningly with climate-scarred presents, have been noted by others,⁴⁸ the dominant ‘narrative genre and critical mode’ through which climate change and carbon economies is imagined, especially in the Global North, is ‘eco-apocalypse’.⁴⁹ Narratives of eco-apocalypse, Wenzel writes, ‘can effect a gentrification of the imagination … ’. They are examples of ‘weak utopianism of a future’ with a ‘desire for privilege intact’. At its most reductive, they are instantiations of a ‘future inferior, in which “Third World problems” (and people) will have arrived in the First World … ’.⁵⁰

Both as a sub-genre and as a temporal modality, postcolonial science fiction militates against these representations of the future inferior and refocuses on questions of survival during or after catastrophe. Thus, Ti-Jeanne, the protagonist of Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, emerges as a fully formed survivalist character in post-apocalyptic Toronto by affirmatively learning to accept the gifts bestowed on her by her deceased grandmother – the Afro-Caribbean ‘traditional’ healer, Gros-Jeanne.⁵¹ Similarly, in Vandana Singh’s cli-fi, the focus of one of the articles in this issue, the emphasis is not so much on climate catastrophe, but on the days after disaster when crisis sinks into the everyday, and is rendered ordinary. If Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island focuses on recurring catastrophes and, in DeLoughrey’s words, ‘asks us to activate our ecological obligations in moments of crisis’, Singh’s stories are not about catastrophe and the environmental sublime, but of the cruddy days after catastrophe where we find obligations in the everyday and the mundane.⁵² Indeed, the temporal modality of postcolonial science fiction is encapsulated in Elizabeth Povinelli’s words:

We hear all around us the coming Event, the catastrophic imaginary orienting and demanding action – the last wave, the sixth extinction. And yet pulsing through various terrains is a very different temporality – the river becomes a polluted dump; the fog becomes smog; rock formations become computer components.⁵³

Such perspectives foreground experiences emerging from geographies of inequality that exist in the past and the present. In such colonial/post-colonial hazardscapes, apocalypse does not lie in the future, but have already happened. To creatively modify the utterance of the protagonist Animal in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, the ‘Apokalis’ is now.⁵⁴ If the ‘Apokalis’ is now, the subjunctive modality of postcolonial science fiction impels us to rethink the future as a past that has already happened for people living in zones of waste and ruin-worlds, and to imagine possibilities of survival and justice via such acknowledgements.⁵⁵

Although Amitav Ghosh says something contiguous about the subjunctive modality we are identifying in a recent interview:

‘The world’ is not the same for everyone. There are many worlds: some have already ended and some are ending … It’s often been pointed out that for many indigenous peoples the world they knew ended a long time ago. However they have managed to survive and have drawn on their experiences to create new worlds. I think we have a lot to learn from them at this time.⁵⁶

This notion of worlds not being the same for everyone is the premise of many science fictions by writers like Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, NK Jemisin, Alexis Wright, Leslie Marmon Silko, Claire G. Coleman and Vandana Singh. As Coleman writes: ‘Novels about the history of Australia are post-apocalyptic, because all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people alive today are the descendants of people who survived an apocalypse.’⁵⁷ The writers above take catastrophic endings such as settler colonialism and transatlantic slavery as a starting point instead of the discourse dominant in hegemonic Anthropocene theory that endings are yet to come. Similarly, anthropologists like Elizabeth Povinelli, critical race scholars like Kathryn Yusoff, Tiffany Lethabo King and Christina Sharpe, decolonial thinkers like Sylvia Wynter, Macarena Gomez-Barris and Alexis Pauline Grumbs, and postcolonial ecocritics like Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Rob Nixon and Jennifer Wenzel shift focus to the experience of colonized populations, actual inhabitants who have continuously lived in lifeworlds devastated by colonizers.⁵⁸ By focusing on such lifeworlds scarred by colonial forms of rule, we locate a different sense of collectivity from below – one that concretely emerges from a ‘shared sense of catastrophe’ and where survival encompasses multiple, unexpected symbioses between human and nonhuman. Baucom too recognizes this possibility when he briefly says that we need to seriously consider how ‘practices of flourishing and survival nourished in the postcolony may increasingly, of necessity, come to inform the planetary practice of the species’.⁵⁹

The key point, therefore, that characterizes our nomenclature of the Anthropocene-as-postcolonial-science-fiction is that catastrophe is not projected into a future that is not yet; instead, such imaginaries begin from the premise that catastrophes have already happened. It’s the aftermath of the event, the days after catastrophe that matter crucially. As NK Jemisin writes in her novel The Fifth Season: ‘the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all … When we say “the world has ended,” it’s usually a lie, because the planet is just fine’.⁶⁰ Dominant Euroamerican discourses, caught as they are within a monohumanist narrative of the ‘human’ and of one ‘world’, have only caught up with this realization belatedly. The accent in postcolonial and indigenous futurisms, where the future has already happened, is on modes of survival, endurance and world-making in already devastated lifeworlds. To modify indigenous activist and author Nick Estes’ book title, ‘our’ history is the future.⁶¹

How do we bring these perspectives from the pasts that have never left and the futures that are always already here to bear on the damaged worlds of our presents? Expanding on this temporal paradox and the modes of survival it facilitates, DeLoughrey, chiming with Baucom’s statement, wagers that indigenous, postcolonial and multispecies forms of thought offer ‘another mode of “species thinking” at planetary scales’.⁶² Consider, for instance, evidence of such renewed ‘species thinking’ in this passage from the Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows:

Sometimes he (the protagonist, Pipi) vanished into the forest with the tribe of Rastas, greedy for the secrets mother Earth confided in them. While we had forsaken her, the Rastas – held in utmost despisement – had renewed that ancestral complicity between mankind and the earth. Rich in humility, with the simplicity of humus, they had entered into the harmony of the forest interior, the thickets and the insects, the sun and the soil, harvesting a natural science … Pipi gave them a hand with their farming, and they provided him with a wealth of information about the life of the soil, the workings of plants, roots, green things thrusting up to the sun with a telluric energy. Thanks to those visits … Pipi became a plant expert and agricultural artist just like some of the Rastas. This knowledge was … a mastery of the arcana linking plants, water, sunlight and soil. When Pipi pressed the Rastas for ways of speeding up the maturation of the yams, for cultivation techniques suited to the steep inclines of ravines, or the rocky fleet of cliffs, for grafts that might change the growth rate of some vegetables and even their size, he met with fierce hostility. The Rastas’ humility before the forces of nature was so profound that they scorned these sacrilegious ideas.

You must go along with the energy of the world, brother, not conquer it.⁶³

The Rastas do not seek to make History by dominating the earth. They respect its alterity and provide a powerful instance of the arts of living on a damaged planet. Despised by many, they forge an alternative system of being and (co)existing with the earth. They frame a sympoietic ‘natural science’ and an agricultural artistry by going along with the energy of the world. In a world scarred by the afterlives of slavery and plantation capitalism, the Rastas forge an intimate relationship with the earth. These ordinary examples of ‘making kin’⁶⁴ with nonhuman others – and we deliberately chose a novel that is not science fiction as our exemplar to show the application of our approach as a modality rather than a genre – reveal perspectives that resist eco-apocalypse and facilitate descents into the minutiae of the mundane in worlds scarred by catastrophe. They impel us to seriously consider the botanist Glenn Albrecht’s statement that the Anthropocene should be renamed the ‘symbiocene'.⁶⁵

Perhaps Chakrabarty is right to suggest that there may be no lifeboats for the rich and privileged in the wake of climate change.⁶⁶ Our collective survival is at stake, accentuated at this current conjuncture by the global spread of COVID-19. But the question of species-survival and climate justice should reconsider the political and collective strategies of those who already survived or are surviving extinction. As Yusoff says, our earlier relation to a monohumanist conception of the ‘world must end for another relation to the earth to begin’.⁶⁷ That’s the valuable lesson of planetary solidarities between human and human, human and nonhuman, and nonhuman and nonhuman that postcolonial studies can still impart in the Anthropocene epoch.

Showcasing multiple disciplines and geographical locations, the six essays and interview with Vandana Singh in this special issue orbit around many of these concerns adumbrated above. We begin with Flavio D’Abramo’s essay. D’Abramo fuses histories of public health, the study of microontologies and postcolonial critique (especially Wynter’s notion of the ‘mimetic trap’) in his fascinating study. Microbiomes simultaneously have a deep time dimension and represent the ‘most sublime biogeological force on planet Earth'. D’Abramo’s essay looks at this sympoetic aspect of microbes in forming multispecies assemblages within the horizon of deep time. His essay provides an incisive historico-political critique of the ‘industrialization of food production over the past century’ that ‘has triggered a series of sanitary crises related to antibiotic resistance'. By tracing the intertwined histories of antibiotic use and resistance with ‘the ecological, social, and geopolitical dynamics created by intense industrial production and international rivalries during the Cold War', D’Abramo demonstrates how the collective ‘we’ or universal human subject conjured in contemporary documents and policies actually operates through a sleight of hand that camouflages geographies of inequality and differential/differentiated access to public health during the period of the Great Acceleration.

Anthropologist Annu Jalais’s essay is also concerned with the collective subject of the Anthropocene. Like Chakrabarty and Baucom, she is concerned with questions of methodology and epistemology. Unlike Chakrabarty and Baucom, however, Jalais argues that the challenge is to rethink the ‘universal’ from within local traditions of intellection. Highlighting some of the recent anthropological literature on the debates about the environment and the nonhuman in the Indic sphere, her paper critically examines how contradictions about this ‘collective’ often returns to deep-seated ideas about what it means to be human, especially in relation to the segregating beliefs in caste, gender and ultimately also nonhumans. Jalais attempts to underscore what lies at the heart of the complex endeavour of making sense of the ‘collective', from an Indic perspective, in a time of climate change and environmental breakdown.

Literary critic Jill Didur’s essay reads the Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand’s neglected novel Two Leaves and a Bud to ‘imagine more just “plantation futures” in an era of environmental crisis shaped by the plantation’s political, economic, environmental and cultural aftermath’. Didur critically engages with the idea of the ‘Plantationocene’, an alternative to the Anthropocene that developed out of work emerging from transdisciplinary projects initiated at Aarhus University in 2014. However, drawing on the works of Sylvia Wynter, Katharine McKittrick and Mythri Jegathesan she also critiques the Aarhus project for its erasure of critical race scholarship on the plantation. While at first sight, Anand’s novel, set in colonial Assam, seems to be set far away from the contexts described by Wynter and McKittrick, Didur’s careful comparative reading of Two Leaves ‘circles back to the entanglement of race with human–nonhuman relations on British colonial tea plantations, and seeks to unpack how history and cultural practices surrounding this extractive industry continue to haunt Anthropocene discourse in the present’. She also shows how the novel dismantles discourses of social and environmental improvement that undergirded the colonial management and circulation of tea as a global commodity, while at the same time, through its ‘plot and plantation’ dynamic ‘anticipates the Plantation (ocene) and its futures, linking the local mesh of human and botanical transplantation on the plantation with the resulting transformation of environmental, political and cultural practices in colonial Assam and beyond’.

The next three essays, all by literary critics, adopt posthumanist viewpoints to zoom in both on the entanglement of humans and nonhumans in the colony and post-colony, and to unearth possibilities of survival in lifeworlds ruined by colonial frameworks and structures. Hella Bloom Cohen reads the ecofeminist themes in poems by Anglophone Palestinian writers, Natalie Handal and Naomi Shihab Nye to argue that their poetic texts ‘extend the facility for mourning to their nonhuman counterparts in ways that refract the archetypical concern for land and return through the lens of symbiosis’ rather than dualist epistemologies. Human exile occurs in a continuum with animal and plant exiles in occupied territory – a point that also chimes with Didur’s arguments about botanical transplantations in the plantation. Palestinian ecofeminist poetry, Cohen argues, honours the land and its agential capacities, instead of casting it as passive, feminized territory that is constantly subjugated. The poems Cohen reads ‘engage a nuanced ontology that shifts the gaze between subaltern and ecological subjects in a way that emphasizes the sympoietic relationship between the human and the nonhuman in the Palestinian indigenous struggle’.

Rituparna Mitra focuses on the possibilities of life and living in the ruin-worlds in Delhi and Kashmir as depicted in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Mitra’s essay is ‘interested in examining transformations in spatialization of the Anthropocene – in particular, how “setting” functions as a form of Anthropocene plotting – wherein multispecies, symbiotic worlds that are at the same time ruptured, fragile and mattered by anomalous proximities are given narrative space’. Through this emphasis on spatialization, especially in urban margins in the post-colony, Mitra studies the depiction of the ‘embedded, embodied, entangled … relational politics’ of post-human subjects in the novel. Refuse, ruins and debris are central hermeneutics of ‘postcolonial Anthropocene liveability’ in the novel – these are material ecologies where humans and nonhumans ‘live in, care for, and die together in’. These ruin worlds also become sites for contingent and heterogenous assemblages and emergent politics.

Yoon Jeong Oh reads three films by South Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho – Snowpiercer, Okja and The Host – to show how Bong’s use of cinematic space rethinks the ‘science of space’ that, according to her, runs in an unbroken line from European imperialist geography to Anthropocene geology. This science of space institutes dualist distinctions between life and nonlife, while Bong’s subversive use of cinematic space enables ‘unknown life’ to continuously appear within such striations through ‘uniquely projected spaces and locales’. Oh’s analyses of the films share affinities with Spivak’s notion of planetarity in the specific sense of the alterity of the planet. Thus, Snowpiercer’s closure shows the human species ‘as a species, one among others in the planet’, while Okja’s representation of Anthropocene time ‘puts pressure on another question, namely the Otherness of Earth itself’. Like Mitra, Oh also advances arguments about the question of dwelling, or, more appropriately, about co-dwelling with others, in the wake of the Anthropocene. This comes out clearly in her reading of The Host:

As much as we inhabit space through the locales of habitual experience, space inhabits us as well. To acknowledge this shift in dwelling means to recognize the Otherness of our surroundings and rethink our relationship with space without falling into abstractions or reifying the entire planet as an object of control.

In short, the three essays by Cohen, Mitra and Oh focus on the ways in which artistic works resymbolize our relationship to the planet.

We conclude with Amit Baishya’s interview with and analytical introduction of South Asian writer Vandana Singh’s cli-fi. We already mentioned how Singh’s fictions, which seem to lack from a dramatic deficit when compared to someone like Amitav Ghosh, asks us to find our obligations in the everyday and the ordinary as opposed to obligations forged during times of catastrophe. Singh’s cli-fi are about ‘crisis ordinariness’.⁶⁸ In this light, Singh’s concerns echo with Mitra and Oh’s focus on questions of dwelling and co-dwelling. At the same time, the interview also discusses the role of nonhumans and Singh’s depictions of animal agency in her stories. Finally, the interview also expands Singh’s adoption of ‘complex systems’ perspectives (Singh is a Professor of Physics at Framingham State University), and her admiration for indigenous epistemologies as secret sharers of the burning issues adumbrated by complex systems theory in the climate-scarred contemporary.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amit R. Baishya

Amit R. Baishya is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Okla- homa. His monograph Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival was published by Routledge in 2018. He is also the co-editor of a collection of essays titled Northeast India: A Place of Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Postcolonial Animalities (Routledge, 2019).

Priya Kumar

Priya Kumar is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Delhi. Prior to this, she was an Associate Professor at the Department of English at the University of Iowa. Her first book, Limiting Secularism: The Ethics of Coexistence in Indian Literature and Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, and Permanent Black, 2008), considers the fraught question of religious coexistence in post-Partition India and its entanglement with the concept of secularism through a study of literary and cinematic narratives that direct us to the possibility of an ethical relationship with those who have been rendered outside the conditional circles of family, religious group, or nation. She has co-edited a special issue of the journal South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, titled, ‘Partition and Sindh: Dispersals, Memories and Diasporas’ (with Rita Kothari), and of the South Asian Review, titled ‘South Asian Diasporas (with Bed Giri)’. She has also published several essays and chapters in books on Partition literature, on ecocriticism, and on Jacques Derrida's late work on hospitality and living together. Currently, she is working on a second monograph Exiles, Strangers, and the Stateless: The Remains of South Asian Partitions in which she is examining the long-term consequences of the mass displacements that emerged in the wake of the partitions of India and Pakistan in 1947 and 1971.

Notes

1 James Bradley, Clade, London: Titan Books, 2015, p 296.

2 In 1999, the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term Anthropocene to depict the transition of Homo sapiens from being biological agents to becoming geological agents on a global scale. Subsequently, in 2000, Crutzen and Stoermer authored a pathbreaking article that humanity had driven the earth-system into a new geological epoch. This conceptualization, immensely influential and controversial, resulted in the formation of the Anthropocene Working Group in 2009 led by Jan Zalaciewicz, a Paleobiologist. The purpose of this group was to determine whether the Anthropocene should be formalized as a new geological epoch, and to decide when this epoch’s stratigraphic marker should be located. See, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, ‘The Anthropocene’, International Geosphere-Biosphere Newsletter, 41, 2000, http://www.mpic.de/mitarbeiter/auszeichnungen-crutzen/the-anthropocene.html; Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018; Jan Zalasiewicz et al. ‘When did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-Twentieth Century Boundary Level Is Stratigraphically Optimal’, Quaternary International, 383, Oct. 2015, pp 196–203.

3 For the Plasticene, see Allison Cobb, Plastic: An Autobiography, New York: Nightboat Books, 2021; Heather Davis, Plastic Matter, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. For technofossils, see Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014; David Farrier, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, New York: Macmillan, 2020.

4 Spivak, Death, p 77.

5 Spivak, Death, p 77.

6 Also see Nigel Clark, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet, Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2011.

7 Spivak, Death, p 77.

8 Derek Attridge, The Work of Literature, London: OUP, 2015, p 16.

9 Attridge, The Work of Literature, 55.

10 Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor, ‘Introduction’, in Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor (eds), Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2017, p 3.

11 Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Specie? Or to Give Humanness a Different Future Conversations’, in Katherine McKittrick (ed), Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015, p 20. Wynter discusses the historical shift from theocentrism to biocentrism in the post-Copernican era, tracing the move from a conceptualization of homo as homo religiosus to homo politicus to its contemporary incarnation as homo oeconomicus. Since the nineteenth century, the notion of the human has been defined ‘on the natural scientific model of a natural organism … a model that supposedly preexists – rather than coexists with – all the models of other human societies and their religions/ cultures’ (‘Unparalleled’, p 21). This monohumanist concept has a uniquely ‘secular liberal’ conception – the homo oeconomicus.

12 Kathryn Yusoff, ‘The Inhumanities’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(3), 2021, p 667, https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1814688.

13 Jennifer Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature, New York: Fordham University Press, 2019, p 5.

14 Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro and Andrea Smith (eds), Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

15 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Richard Philcox (trans), New York: Grove Press, 2005, p 239.

16 Anna Louwenhaupt Tsing et al (eds), The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017; Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 2015.

17 For a critique of Chakrabarty’s species universalism, see Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, London: Verso, 2017, p 67.

18 For Capitalocene, see Jason W. Moore (ed), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Oakland, CA: Kairos, 2016. For a critique see Francoise Verges, ‘Racial Capitalocene’, in Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (eds), Futures of Black Radicalism, London and New York: Verso Books, 2017, pp 72–82. Jill Didur’s essay in our issue discusses the concept of the Plantationocene extensively. Didur draws on Katherine McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 17(3), November 2013, https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2378892.

19 Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019; Mark W. Driscoll, The Whites are the Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

20 Grove, Savage Ecology, p 5.

21 Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke, London: Macmillan, 2012; Flood of Fire, London: Macmillan, 2016.

22 Driscoll, Whites, p ix.

23 Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island: A Novel, New Delhi: Penguin Random House India, 2019, p 279.

24 Here we follow Jason Moore who writes that the Capitalocene is ‘a way of organizing nature – as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology’ (Anthropocene or Capitalocene, p 6).

25 Nancy Langston, Climate Ghosts: Migratory Species in the Anthropocene, Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2021, p 2.

26 Spivak, Death, p 101.

27 Mahasweta Devi, ‘Pterdactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha’, in Gayatri C. Spivak (trans), Imaginary Maps, Calcutta: Thema, 2001, p 157.

28 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, 35, Winter 2009, pp 197–222; ‘Anthropocene Time’, History and Theory, 57(2), March 2018, p 9; ‘Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories’, Critical Inquiry, 41, Autumn 2014, pp 1–23; ‘Humanities in the Anthropocene: An Enduring Kantian Fable’, New Literary History, 47, 2016, pp 377–397; The Human Condition in the Anthropocene: The Tanner Lectures in Human Values. Lectures presented at Yale University, February 18–19, 2015; ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change’, New Literary History, 43(1), Winter 2012, pp 1–18; ‘The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category’, Critical Inquiry, 46(1), Autumn 2019, pp 1–31. Also see, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

29 Chakrabarty, ‘Climate of History’, p 222.

30 For the difference between being-in-common and common being, see Clark, Inhuman Nature, p 151.

31 Chakrabarty, ‘Climate of History’, p 208.

32 Chakrabarty, ‘Climate and Capital’, p 3.

33 Gautam Basu Thakur, ‘A Strangeness Beyond Reckoning: The Animal as Surplus in Postcolonial Literature’, in Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya (eds), Postcolonial Animalities, London, New York: Routledge, 2019, p 31.

34 For his discussion of comparative planetary studies, see ‘Climate and Capital’, p 23. For elaborations of the difference between his and Spivak’s concept, see ‘The Planet’, p 5.

35 Chakrabarty, ‘The Planet’, p 3.

36 Chakrabarty, ‘Climate and Capital’, p 23.

37 Intizar Hussain, Basti, Frances W. Pritchett (trans), New Delhi: OUP, 2007, p 179.

38 Hussain, Basti, p 142.

39 Ian Baucom, History 4˚Celsius: Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020, p 6.

40 Baucom, History, p 7.

41 Baucom, History, p 31.

42 Julia Adeney Thomas, ‘Why the Anthropocene is Not Climate Change and Why It Matters’, Asiaglobalonline, 10, Jan 2019, http://www.asiaglobalonline.hku.hk/anthropocene-climate-change; Wenzel, Disposition.

43 Wenzel, Disposition, p 4.

44 Shital Pravinchandra, ‘One Species, Same Difference? Postcolonial Studies and the Concept of Life’, New Literary History, 47(1), Winter 2016, p 33.

45 Pravinchandra, ‘One Species’, p 38.

46 See, for instance, Elizabeth Povinelli, Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021; Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Its worth noting though that indigenous, enslaved and colonized populations have often been relegated to the level of nonlife. As Yusoff writes: ‘The material incorporation of the European subject (and its settler colonial kin) in terms of value, accumulation, and subjective forms was defined against what was classified as fossil nature (indigeneity) and fossil energy (the enslaved) to transform the ecological and energetic organization of the world as a global geography’ (‘The Inhumanities’, p 664).

47 Mark Rifkin, Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, p 67.

48 Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meaning of Endangered Species, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016, p 203.

49 Wenzel, Disposition, p 31.

50 Wenzel, Disposition, pp 32–35.

51 Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring, Toronto: Warner Books, 1998.

52 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, p 157.

53 Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016, p 177.

54 Indra Sinha, Animal’s People: A Novel, London, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009.

55 For Rifkin, the modality of the subjunctive comprises ‘what might be, what should be, what one wishes were the case … a mediated and complex relation to the real’ (Fictions, p 67).

56 Amitav Ghosh, ‘What We have to Think About, Above All, is to Slow Down’, The Hindu, 25 April 2020, https://www.google.com/search?q=amitav+ghosh+hindu&oq=amitav+ghosh+hindu&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l2.4247j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.

57 Claire G. Coleman, ‘Apocalypses are More than the Stuff of Fiction – First Nations Australians Survived One’, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-08/first-nations-australians-survived-an-apocalypse-says-author/9224026?fbclid=IwAR1BFm6rgHQRdJbbGCDQMld27wRAtgXN2SZcbEd3Ql--wQYwc-qSa0Uni1k.

58 Alexis Pauline Grumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Oakland: AK Press, 2020; Macarena Gomez Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017; DeLoughrey, Allegories; Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019; Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018; Kyle Powys Whyte, ‘Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1(1–2), May 2018, pp 224–242; Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016; Rob Nixon, ‘Anthropocene 2,’ in Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger (eds), Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, New York: Fordham University Press, 2017, pp. 43–6.

59 Baucom, History, p 87.

60 N K Jemisin, The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth I), London: Orbit, 2015, p 14.

61 Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, London: Verso, 2019.

62 DeLoughrey, Allegories, p 156.

63 Patrick Chamoiseau, The Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, Linda Coverdale (trans), Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1999, pp 139–140.

64 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

65 Glenn Albrecht, ‘Exiting the Anthropocene and Entering the Symbiocene’, Center for Humans and Nature, 9(2), Spring 2016, https://www.humansandnature.org/exiting-the-anthropocene-and-entering-the-symbiocene.

66 Chakrabarty, ‘Climate of History’, p 222.

67 Yusoff, Billion, p 63.

68 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, pp 100–101.