It's a long shot for lots of reasons, but my hosts at Renmin have asked if I'd be willing to teach there again this coming summer. Indeed I would be, committed as I am to civil society dialogue even between strategically competitive countries. I even proposed a new course!
Anthropocene Humanities
The Anthropocene names the new reality – and awareness – that humanity has become a planetary agent, the single most important factor in current earth history. The term was coined by natural scientists but has increasingly been taken up by thinkers in the human sciences. This course surveys anglophone debates about the meaning and significance of humanity’s new status within the earth system from historical, philosophical, literary and comparative, as well as feminist, postcolonial and postsecular perspectives. Conducted in English, the course employs the tools of the humanities to make sense of the Anthropocene, and uses the challenge of the Anthropocene to reimagine the work of the humanities.
1. Introduction: What is the Anthropocene?
Steve Bradshaw, “Anthropocene: A Documentary”
Jill Schneiderman, “Awake in the Anthropocene”
2. The Anthropocene and the environmental humanities
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses”
Jeremy Davies, Birth of the Anthropocene
3. Philosophical challenges of the Anthropocene
Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene
Roy Scranton, “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene”
4. Queering the Anthropocene
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “A Feminist Approach to the Anthropocene: Earth Stalked by Man”
Whitney A. Bauman, “Climate Weirding and Queering Nature: Getting Beyond the Anthropocene
5. Decolonizing the Anthropocene
Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene”
Françoise Vergès, “Racial Capitalocene: Is the Anthropocene Racial?”
6. Desecularizing the Anthropocene
Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Gods of the Anthropocene: Geo-Spiritual Formations in the Earth’s New Epoch”
Fabrice Monteiro, “The Prophet” (photo series)
7. A Chinese antidote to the Anthropocene?
James Miller, China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future
8. Writing Anthropocene futures
Donna Haraway, “The Camille Stories”
