About time: climate change and inventions of the decolonial, planetarity and radical existence

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the underlying transformation produced by social ecological crisis– a transformation in the time scales for human agency. First, we trace how authors who conjunct readings on the question of climate change and time open up the space to question the race-based temporal technologies and their entanglement with racial planetary-capital regimes. Second, we engage with transition and adaptation. Transition and adaptation are colonial and accumulation temporal enabling conditions for the emergence, development and transmutation of the incommensurate to capitalization of the planetary. Finally, we conclude by arguing that, instead of focusing on capital's attempts to make its most ‘fatal leap’ between its assumed logical topologies and ‘historical’ cartographies by reanimating ‘dead’ critiques, we follow Fanon and attempt to introduce ‘invention into existence,’ the reactivation of living energies, their flux, and their improvisations for the conditions for a planetary as a decolonial project, not as an accomplished fact.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecology
• time
• climate change
• Capitalocene
• Anthropocene
• decolonial

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This reading could not be possible without Gavin Walker’s work (2012) on the question of transition from feudalism to capitalism.

 

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna M. Agathangelou

Anna M. Agathangelou is a professor of Politics at York University. She is the co-editor of (with Kyle D. Killian) Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations: (De)Fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives, co-editor (with Nevzat Soguk) of Arab Revolutions and World Transformations, co-author with L.H.M. Ling of Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds, and author of the Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation-States.

Kyle D. Killian

Kyle D. Killian, Ph.D. is a licensed couple and family therapist, professor, a Clinical Fellow and Approved Supervisor of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, and a Board Member of the American Family Therapy Academy. His books include Interracial Couples, Intimacy and Therapy (Columbia University Press), and, with Dr Agathangelou, Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations. Dr Killian writes on resilience, self-care, and social justice on his blog at Psychology Today called Intersections. He can be reached at kkillian.org