Multiple Anthropocenes: pluralizing space–time as a response to ‘the Anthropocene’

ABSTRACT

This article examines how ‘the Anthropocene’ is conceptualized within discourses on security, politics, and ethics, and is narrated as a global-collective experience for all of humanity with an identifiable beginning, common horizon, and shared fate. However, this space–time framing assumes knowledge and experience not actually shared. Even critical engagements with the Anthropocene frequently invoke cosmopolitan space–time referents when seeking to intervene or call for action. Instead, we turn to the metaphor of the palimpsest and its discussion by Jacques Derrida alongside the ‘worldism’ and ‘multiple worlds’ of Anna Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling to propose the heterogeneity of space–time. Doing so de-centres monolithic portrayals of climate change as ‘the Anthropocene’ and enables ‘Multiple Anthropocenes’, or the multiplicity of experiences of extinction and visions of political and ethical response. We conclude by discussing some insights from indigenous and queer space–time perspectives that narrate various climate change experiences that are evaded and written-over.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• colonialism
• postcolonialism
• space–time

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Anna Agathangelou, Lina Benabdallah, Kevin Bruyneel, François Debrix, Kyle Killian, and Kyle Powys Whyte for helpful advice and conversations, and the participants on a roundtable discussion at the 2019 meeting of the International Studies Association – Northeast including Alex Barder, Mauro Caraccioli, Cara Daggett, Simon Dalby, Stefanie Fishel, and Timothy Vasko. We wrote this paper at Wake Forest University, a campus residing on land that was a site of exchange and interaction for the Saura, Catawba, Cherokee, and Lumbee in this location, and for the Lumbee, Eno, Sissipahaw, and Occaneechi in the original location. Wake Forest University also profited from the institution of slavery. As non-indigenous scholars, we are committed to helping unsettle some of the most dominant assumptions in academia and IR that have marginalized communities and persons including indigenous, black, and queer voices and perspectives.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Indeed, Giddens identified technologies of climate change as such a threat.

2 This is what Andrew Hom (2016) refers to as ‘timing’.

3 See Ling (2002) for how Self/Other similarly fails.

4 It’s worth emphasizing that this statement is not meant to gloss over the emergence and presence of postcolonial and decolonial studies (see Bhambra, 2014).

5 Yusoff’s critical survey of these origins includes 1452, 1610, 1800, and the 1950s. For Crutzen (2002), the origin point is best exemplified by the invention of the steam engine (1784) as global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane began to be detected. Others have emphasized post-1945 in which population growth, urbanization, the consumption of fossil fuels, and nuclear testing greatly accelerated (McNeill & Engelke, 2016). Critical responses have focused on colonization as marked by Europe’s arrival in the Americas (Davis & Todd, 2017; Haraway, 2015) or Europe’s geopolitics more broadly (Grove, 2019).

6 With the important exception of Davis and Todd (2017).

7 Popular environmental dystopic and post-apocalyptic films that directly feature climate change include Avatar, 2012, and The Day After Tomorrow.

8 ‘Geologic time’ can be challenging for ‘human time’ when one does not subsume the other. They can be times in conflict (Agathangelou, 2016, p. 341).

9 Vanessa Watts (2013) draws a distinction between Euro-Western epistemological and ontological frame and an indigenous frame of ‘Place-Thought’ in Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe cosmologies.

10 In this regard Muñoz (2009) challenges the no politics stance of Edelman (2004).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jack Amoureux

Jack Amoureux is an Associate Teaching Professor at Wake Forest University. He studies ethics in International Relations and international political theory. Amoureux has published articles in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, International Relations, and International Theory. He also has two books with Routledge Press – A practice of ethics for global politics: Ethical reflexivity and Reflexivity in international relations: Positionality, critique, and practice.

Varun Reddy

Varun Reddy is a graduate of Wake Forest University and recipient of the 2019 Carl Moses Excellence in Research Award for his senior seminar paper ‘A Politics of Pure Means: Anti-fascism, Incivility, and Protest in the Modern Era’. He works at a law firm in Dallas, Texas specializing in copyright and trademark litigation. He plans to pursue a JD/Ph.D.