Monsters, catastrophes and epistemic violence in the Anthropocene. For a postcolonial feminist understanding and political project

Abstract

My critique of the Anthropocene explores European and Western imaginaries of natural disaster, mass migration and terrorism through a postcolonial inquiry into modern conceptions of monstrosity and catastrophe. Established monstrous icons in popular visual culture and news media help trace the genealogy of modern fears of human/environmental catastrophe. Widely investigated in many fields, including art, literature, philosophy, history, cultural studies, and feminist and queer studies, monstrification in my analysis coincides with a historically produced discursive process that may reveal the relationship between the violence of the Anthropocene and its legitimation across time and space. Yet my inquiry does not stop at unveiling the inherent violence of the Anthropocene but goes on to propose a feminist, post-developmental and ecologist epistemology and a political project that embraces a new conception of the political.

Keywords

• Anthropocene
• coloniality of racial capitalism
• feminist political project
• processes of monstrification
• visual culture