Kathryn Yusoff repurposed the golden spikes of the stratigraphers in service of a deeper history; at each of the points considered by the anthropocenologists as a possible marker for the start of the "age of humans" - 1950s, 1800, 1610 - she asks who was "impaled" on these spikes. Black and brown bodies destroyed and dehumanized at every turn by the schemes and structures of European hegemons.
Françoise Vergès presented the argument that the Anthropocene would be more fittingly called the capitalocene, since it's the logic and spread of capitalism that has driven anthropogenic calamity in the earth systems, not just "man." Then she extended it: if we acknowledge the colonial premodernity which funded and provided the templates for industrial capitalism (legacies which continue in our day) we may find it more apposite to speak of a racial capitalocene.
Emily Raboteau, responding to a public art project of the Climate Museum, provided a vivid portrait of a New York City threatened in myriad ways by climate change, ways almost all of which are compounded by long histories of environmental racism, also demonstrating the powers of art - in words, images, narratives - to humanize problems which seem beyond our capacity to comprehend. (The image above is her work too.)
The debates about geological markers seemed a distraction now, the presentism of Anthropocene alarm - as if harm had only recently begun to accrue - culpably naive. If we are to understand what has happened we need a deeper, fuller history - which turns out to be a history of horrors. Understand it and then what? The history may offer ways of imagining alternatives to the racial capitalocene, like practices of indigenous survival (next week's readings) or the new connections to new land that emerged in the "provision grounds," small plots of land Africans enslaved in New World plantations were given to feed themselves.
None of this week's assigned readings address religion but we had gotten to know a religion just last week which now seemed to speak from and to this deeper, fuller history of horrors. I called up the transcription of Earthseed we'd produced from Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower - our working template for what a religion can be - and wound up stopping at the epigraph to chapter 4.
A victim of God may,
Through learning adaptation,
Become a partner of God,
A victim of God may,
Through forethought and planning,
Become a shaper of God.
Or a victim of God may,
Through shortsightedness and fear,
Remain God’s victim,
God’s plaything,
God’s prey.How might the XXX-cene be understood from the perspective and experience of those who are its victims, not the perpetrators? (Perhaps for the first time all are now aware that we might be "victims of God.") Might this imagination open ways of facing realities which don't flee into fantasies of escape or mastery, denialist supplication before a transcendent god or the desire to be such a god? It was a lot to do in one session... we'll see if any of these seeds takes root.
