Constitutionalizing in the Anthropocene Research Week @ Tilburg Law School 8-11 April 2024

I have been invited to participate in a panel at the Constitutionalizing in the Anthropocene research week (you can find the entire programme here). The panel is called ‘The inhuman as capital’, where I will be in conversation with Adam Bobbette and Julia Dehm. There has been a bit of an email exchange before the panel, and it sounds like the different directions from which we are coming might be quite interesting in complicating the theme. I have actually been writing a chapter on economics as part of my book, so thought it might be a good opportunity to ‘field test’ some of the ideas. The chapter is currently titled ‘Marx’s dogs’ (it started off as ‘we have never been social’). It has become a bit of a satirical take on Donna Haraway’s criticism of Marx in her writing on dogs. By looking at Marx’ own dogs, his commentary on dog taxation, dog tax riots, and dog taxation as a colonial tool, I am questioning avoidance of the economic within new materialism. Although many new materialist authors are talking about ‘socialising the nonhuman’, economics rarely seem to be part of the social. Marx, in particular, has become a bit of an odd enemy figure, given the many possible enemies that new materialism should have, but seems to uncritically embrace despite their politics (Nietzsche, Schmitt, Heidegger, etc). This tendency is especially worrying considering that authors such as Haraway originally began their theoretical journey with anti-capitalist critiques, and considering that there are many smart critiques of Marx that draw out more important issues with his work (e.g. see Unpayable Debt by Denise Ferreira da Silva).

Towards the end of writing my chapter, I came across a neat little book (about 80 pages) that also makes an argument about dogs and economics. The book is called Rescue Me and is authored by Margret Grebowicz. Like Haraway, Grebowicz focuses on dog ownership, however, she ends up in quite a different place. I picked up my copy at the ICA after a ceasefire demo and, at first, the premise of the book seemed rather frivolous given the depressing circumstances. However, Grebowicz ends up making a rather profound argument about reflections on the nonhuman and how they can prompt a rethinking of human-nonhuman socialities (it made me think, for example, of the intensely discussed images of pets in Gaza). Especially at times where it feels as if academic discourse does not have much to say – the association of publication numbers with job security certainly does not help – it is nice to find pieces that convey a message without too much posturing. In fact, the focus is on today’s economic pressures and how they shape relations. The narrative – both in content and style – felt like a much needed antidote to new materialist blindspots.

I am now curious how the research week will go, and which directions people are coming from. I am particularly looking forward to the part on pedagogy. More in a few weeks!

Anthropocenes Journal

When I first got asked if I wanted to join the editorial team of a journal, my first response was ‘hell, no!’ Not only are journals a lot of work, and academics already have very little time for even the most basic activities, but it would also mean asking people to review. From previous experience, the answer to this is mostly ‘no’, so you spend weeks trying to persuade equally stressed colleagues to undertake voluntary work. I was also not sure about the journal’s title ‘Anthropocenes‘, since I had voiced my discomfort with the term and how it has become used (apparently, this is why I was asked to join). What eventually persuaded me was the insistence of the postgraduates who are involved in the journal, and the possibility of expanding my geohumanities related work. While the journal is technically active already, it is formally being launched next spring.

Anthropocenes is an interdisciplinary open access journal that focuses less on governmental or scientific ways of addressing environmental problems, and more on the ideas, practices and relations that become sidelined during the present crisis. These tend to figure mostly as silent contributors to, or manifestations of, anthropogenic environmental change. At the same time, there is a concern, as the journal introduction puts it, about ‘aloof philosophical approaches’ that seem to jar with the seriousness of what is happening. This ethos is reflected in the type of publications that are being sought. While the journal publishes ‘classic’ academic pieces, it encourages to move beyond this format.

For me, the journal also relates quite closely to the excellent Materialisms reading group, run by David Chandler (also one of the journal editors, together with Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos) and Olivia Rutazibwa, which has given space to academic and non-academic theory nerds for over a decade. I appreciate this group, because it is marked by both generosity and critique – conflicts of opinion are appreciated, as is the care about authors who made a book-length argument. I am hoping that the journal will reflect this kind of conversation. I also hope that it will make some interesting and thoughtful interventions.

TCS GeoSocial Formations Special Issue is out

Photo: Bron Szerszynski

The Theory, Culture & Society special issue on GeoSocial Formations is finally out! Please email me, if you don’t have access and would like to read it.

“Five Propositions” out on GeoCritique

Image source: GeoCritique

The newly redesigned GeoCritique has just published the five propositions that Ame Kanngieser and I delivered as a critique at the Anthropocene themed RGS-IBG 2015 conference in Exeter, UK. The propositions also represent an experiment in positioning ourselves not just in relation to Anthropocene discourse, but in terms of geography, race, gender etc. This is an on-going writing experiment, and we welcome critique.

New Article in TCS Geo-Social Formations Special Issue

Image Source: Björk ‘Mutal Core’

My new article ‘We Are the World? Anthropocene Cultural Production between Geopoetics and Geopolitics‘ is now out in the ‘Geo-Social Formations and the Anthropocene’ Special Issue of Theory, Culture & Society. It was written two years ago, and should be read as the predecessor of the Geoforum article on geopoetics and geopolitics. Big thank you to Kathryn Yusoff and Nigel Clark for inviting me to participate in this issue. Other authors include Myra J Hird and Simon Dalby.

The article is also the second in a series of three on interwar ‘cosmic’ materialisms and their implications for the present. The previous one, ‘Negotiating the Inhuman: Bakhtin, Materiality & the Instrumentalisation of Climate Change’ was also published by Theory, Culture & Society. The third one is currently under review at another journal.

Abstract

The proposal of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a new geological epoch where humans represent the dominant natural force has renewed artistic interest in the ‘geopoetic’, which is mobilized by cultural producers to incite changes in personal and collective participation in planetary life and politics. This article draws attention to prior engagements with the geophysical and the political: the work of Simone Weil and of the editors of the Martinican cultural journal Tropiques, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire. Synthesizing the political and scientific shifts in human-world relationships of their time, both projects are set against oppressive or narcissistic materialisms and experiment with the image of the ‘cosmic’ to cultivate a preoccupation not (only) with a tangible materialism but with an intangible one that emphasizes process and connectivity across wide spatial and temporal scales. The writers’ movement between poetics and politics will be used to enquire what kind of socio-political work a contemporary geopoetic could potentially do.

Guest talk at the New Centre for Research & Practice

On Monday, I gave a virtual guest lecture at the New Centre for Research & Practice. It was the first instalment of a seminar on ‘Global Politics of the Anthropocene‘, organised and taught by Carlos Amador. You can still join the remainder of the discussion, either as a ‘student’ (which enables you to join the discussions) or as a silent listener (‘audit’ option). The upcoming Monday events (UK time: 11pm – 1:30 am) include speakers across disciplines, including fellow Scottish academic Zoe Todd (Anthropology, University of Aberdeen).

The paper I had prepared was on Daniel Maximin‘s geopoetics, which focus on undoing hegemonic geopolitical images by utilising the geophysical. The talk also drew attention to the violence of academic knowledge production, including citation practices. Both themes, for me, relate very strongly to Anthropocene discourse, where attention to the colonial/imperialist dimensions of geophysical phenomena, as well as of research practices themselves, has been lacking.

Image source: New Centre for Research & Practice

CFP: ‘Not drowning but fighting’: Decolonising the Anthropocene

Image: Tokelauns protest during Pacific Warrior Day of Action (Te Mana: Litia Maiava) via ABC Australia

We all may be a geophysical force, we may all be geology,
but we don’t matter, are matter and own matter equally.
Despite this realisation, we feel like we’ve been rendered geologically active,
but politically rather passive.
We pass through premature fossilisation in the face of nature’s agency
that we are suddenly able to perceive, apparently through Bruno Latour.
Shouting, flailing, we spew forth a deluge of cultural production
that portrays us as just that: already dead.

While the Anthropocene is embraced as an opportunity to reframe our engagement with the ‘geo’ in geography or even geopolitics, the on-going struggles against the dynamics that gave rise to the phenomenon of the Anthropocene are rarely mentioned. At best, the image of the Anthropocene serves to confirm the excesses of capitalism or is used to fantasise about a complicity of the Earth with socialist ideals of revolution. But mostly, discourse around the Anthropocene extends the experience economy into deep time and the earth’s core through affective engagements. The great Promethean realisation of the (M)anthropocene liberates us from paying attention to the everyday struggles against continued injustices against humans and nonhumans alike. In this session we would like to make present the not-so-present narratives of the Anthropocene in geographical discourse, especially around violence, inequality, white supremacy and on-going colonialism.
What does it mean, to use Aimé Césaire’s words, ‘to inhabit the face of a great disaster’, to witness and participate in its continued (re)production, both inside and outside of academia? What examples of contestation and intervention provoke re-inscription?

We invite responses for a session for the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference ‘Geographies of the Anthropocene’ in Exeter, UK (1-4 September 2015).
Please e-mail abstracts (250 words) to  Kathryn Yusoff (k.yusoff@qmul.ac.uk), Ame Kanngieser (a.kanngieser@gold.ac.uk) or Angela Last (angela.last@glasgow.ac.uk) by 1 February 2015.

Next week: RITA seminar ‘Imagining Caribbean Future Spaces’

Image source: unknown

Next week, the RITA seminar ‘Imagining Caribbean Future Spaces’ will be taking place at the University of Birmingham. I will be speaking on the ‘Future Environmental Spaces’ panel with Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. This is the abstract for my presentation. Hopefully see some of you there!

‘Apostrophant l’apocalypse, misant sur le déluge prêt à remodeler ton île avec le secours de ton volcan, tu as failli te faire toi aussi prendre au piège du terrorisme par procuration. Et tu cherches encore à préserver ton style pour le suivi de ta dérive sans oser rester seul en l’ayant dépassé. Mais ne va rien déchirer encore…’ (from Daniel Maximin, Soufrières, 1987).

What are we doing when we ‘apostrophise’ the apocalypse? I propose that the kinds of acts that resonate with this word and with this paragraph enable a productive dialogue with recent apocalyptic dialogue around climate change and the anthropocene. Based on my struggle with the translation of the above quote, this paper looks at the relations between destructive (or potentially destructive) relations between natural forces and human politics that have been rendered particularly sharply in the Caribbean. It is such relations that need to be addressed if we (and who is this we?) are still invested in a different kind of future. If the Caribbean, despite the constant natural and political threats that it is subjected to, is ‘not an apocalyptic world’ (Benìtez-Rojo), as it has been claimed, what might Caribbean discourse tell us about other ways of framing the contemporary and future planetary condition?

RITA Seminar: Imagining Caribbean Future Spaces

Courthouse and former Employee, Plymouth, Monserrat. Image: Christopher Pillitz

I am honoured to be speaking on the Future Environmental Spaces panel at the upcoming RITA (Race in the Americas) seminar on Imagining Caribbean Future Spaces. My presentation ‘Apostropher L’Apocalypse’ will discuss French-Caribbean poetic engagements with disasters and politics, and their invaluable contributions to Anthropocene discourse. The seminar is taking place on 31 October at the University of Birmingham and is organised by Patricia Noxolo, Adunni Adams and James Owen Heath. Attendance is free of charge. Speakers include Lisabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Fabienne Viala, Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Pat Noxolo, Louise Hardwick and Thomas Glave.

Here are the seminar details:

“[W]e need imaginations that are sensitive to inner-city decay and the lungs of the globe orchestrated into forests and rivers and skies. We need to build afresh through the brokenness of our world….”
— Wilson Harris

This one-day symposium looks at the ways in which the Caribbean and the future are imagined together. How has the future of the Caribbean been imagined and how is it being re-imagined at a time of environmental change and global insecurity? How does the future look when we imagine it in and through the Caribbean – is the Caribbean a space to imagine the future differently?

31 October 2014, 9am – 5.15pm

The University of Birmingham
Room 311
Geography Building
Edgbaston
Birmingham B15 2TT

You can register for the seminar here. The programme can be viewed here.

Carribbean Future Spaces is funded by the Institute for Latin American Studies & the University of Birmingham.

AAG 2015 CFP: Feminist Geophilosophy

Image: Still from Björk ‘Mutual Core’

Feminist geophilosophy

AAG 2015 CFP, Chicago IL 21st – 25th April 2015

Convenors: Angela Last (University of Glasgow) and Kathryn Yusoff (Queen Mary University of London)
Sponsored by the Cultural Geography Specialty Group (CGSG) of the Association of American Geographers

The current Anthropocenic milieu has given rise to a flurry of geophilosophical musings and “geo” appendages that are responding to the call to push thought further into the earth. Located in a wider field of engagements with matter and inorganic life, Anthropocenic thought must strive to rethink the relation between territory and earth and grapple with the emergence of a geopolitical field that is constituted by the geologic underpinnings of life and power. Planetary thought does not only represent a provocation to philosophy, but also to geography: what does it mean to think (with) the Earth? If geophilosophy claims this as its project, then it needs to negotiate a near infinite number of choices, reminiscent of Bataille’s claim that while philosophy must ‘positively envisage the waste products of intellectual appropriation’, it may not be able to deal with the scale and heterogeneity of what it finds. Here, a feminist reading perhaps sensitises us to the acts of selection that are being performed: what is or can be included, considering the scope? What is, in Barad’s terms ‘excluded from mattering’? What alliances are formed, uncovered or disregarded across the planet and beyond? A tradition of feminist thought also alerts us to the modes of exhaustion and forms of violence that characterize such matterings and their potential to become otherwise.

Considering that geophilosophy is often presented as an almost exclusively male domain despite its many claims to a diverse and inclusive discourse, the provocation of a feminist geophilosophy session offers an opportunity to think about imperative alliances between feminism and geophilosophy. Reminiscent of Graham Harman’s ‘Girls Welcome!!!’ comment about the perceived ‘sausage fest’ of speculative realism, similar arguments could be made regarding geophilosophy’s intellectual scene. In this session we assert the unequivocal importance of feminist perspectives on geophilosophy to address the contours of power, race, sex, speciesm, biology and futurity within the context of the Anthropocene. If, indeed the Anthropocene is to betray its (homo)normative origins in the consecration of “Man”, Anthropocenic thought needs to find new points of departure that examine these spurious origins and problematic invocations to offer alternative strategies for solidarity and modes of existence with/in the earth.

Image: Still from Ellen Gallagher ‘Nothing is…’

As such, we welcome papers that attend to:

• Inhuman genealogies and inorganic life
• Geologic thought/philosophies of geology/geotrauma
• Feminist geophilosophers
• Anthropocene and racialization
• Anthropocene and postcolonial thought/decolonization
• Anthropocene and feminism
• Matter and geopower(s)
• Queer ecologies and geologies
• Epistemic violence and political ontology
• Links between feminist geopolitics, feminist science studies and feminist geophilosophy

To be considered for the session, please send your abstract of 250 words or fewer, to: angela.Last@glasgow.ac.uk and k.yusoff@qmul.ac.uk

The deadline for the receipt of abstracts is October 1 2014. Notification of acceptance will be before October 7. All accepted papers will then need to register for the AAG conference at http://www.aag.org/annualmeeting. Accepted papers will be considered for a special issue or edited volume edited by the convenors.