I've finalized the syllabus for the course I'll be teaching for Renmin's Online International Summer School in a few weeks - a new one. Being online will be a new challenge in this context, too. I will not be lecturing for 3.5 hours each day, I can tell you that! But how to get students working in smaller groups, and to get to know them, remains to be worked out.
It's a different class than the one I taught there twice before, and I'm realizing it may also involve some awkward questions. This is not just because the Anthropocene, as I understand it, is largely a story of the materialist culture of the anglocene ruining things for everyone, but because the Summer School starts just as the celebrations of the centenary of the Chinese Community Party reach their apex on July 1st. The "our civilization is already dead" epiphany of Roy Scranton, whose essays have put the Anthropocene on the American map, will sound a little different in this setting.
Of course it's dead, I'm imagining a propaganda-primed student saying, but that's just your civilization. Our 生态文明 ("ecological civilization") will bury you.
I don't really want to get into the ways Chinese culture has its own patterns of anthropogenic ecological disruption, or the appeal and pitfalls of what folks in the biz call "eco-authoritarianism," so will be focusing on the role of the humanities in any ecological project: pluralizing, historicizing, motivating, humanizing - and, as we recognize our bonds to our other earthling kin, posthumanizing. Renmin is a social sciences and policy-focused place, so talking up humanities is part of my brief, and I'll be happy to stick to it.
I'm hoping the wise perspective of historian Julia Adeney Thomas, which we'll read for the second session, will provide a platform for constructive discussion sans politics. Thomas, who has offered Neoconfucian Tokugawa Japan as a model for an ecological civilization, indicts all the regnant narratives for lacking seriousness about the "diminished hopes" which must inform our thinking about the human prospect, endorsing two others: a galvanizing "singular story" at the global level, informed by science and implemented by a kind of "benevelont totalitarianism," and a "democracy of voices" at the local level, championing local knowledge and ingenuity. A big enough umbrella for us all? Let a thousand flowers bloom!
