Parse Journal (Jan 2023)
The Black Anthropocene
Abstract
The Black Anthropocene, plenary session by Axelle Karera Moderated by Jyoti Mistry on November 17th, 2021 as a part of the PARSE 4th biennial research conference on Violence. It is indeed the case that Anthropos’ imprints on what we might provisionally call “nature” is undeniable. And the degree to which “man’s power” over the earth beckoned massive regimes of techno-ideologies of survival is equally irrefutable. Though discourses of the Anthropocene neither contest geology’s pronouncements nor invest in assessing the politics of its scientific nomenclature, the grounds on which the term continues to carve its discursive trajectories remains tenuous. Here, the accusations range from charges of obscurantism to calling the term a misnomer of catastrophic magnitude – a misnomer that merely revived the hegemonies of brute empiricisms at the expense of a vast range of critical work. These accusations are certainly not far-fetched; and critique’s “alleged” paranoia cannot overstate the punctual resurgence of a scientific rationality pruned for Anthropocenean anxieties. By assessing how and why Anthropocene discourses continue to uncritically endorse a seemingly salvific scientific logic, this talk turns to the figure of blackness in the Anthropocene in order to discern how renewed positivist sensibilities are effectively exculpating a range of violent actors while simultaneously incriminating the most vulnerable communities in our current ecological demise. More than only suggesting that blackness redirects our inquiries into the intimate complicities between destructive ecological violence and the imaginative arts of Anthropocene’s various caregivers, the talks shows that blackness’ ordinary experience of dispossession necessarily complicates matters at hand.
