Further Reading: Culture and the Anthropocene

On the Anthropocene:

• Explore the concept through other conceptualisations of the anthropocene: e.g,  capitalocene (Moore, 2013); Chthulucene (Haraway, 2015); Anthropo-scene (Lorimer, 2017); Plastic-ene (New York Times, 2014); Plantationcene (Tsing, 2015); Mis-anthropocene (Clover & Spahr, 2014); Anthrobscene (Parikka, 2015); Ecocene (Norgaard, 2013); Plutocene (Glikson, 2017); Technocene (Hornborg, 2015). 
• Moore, J (2013). “Anthropocene, Capitalocene and the myth of industrialization II.” World-Ecological Imaginations: Power and Production in the Web of Life; 
• Moore J W (2014) The Capitalocene, Part I & 2 (On the Nature & Origins of Our Ecological Crisis/Abstract Social Nature and the Limits to Capital); 
• Haraway, D (2015). “Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin.” Environmental humanities 6, no. 1: 159-165; 
• Lorimer, J (2017). “The Anthropo-scene: A guide for the perplexed.” Social Studies of Science 47, no. 1: 117-142;
• New York Times The Editorial Board, (2014) Notes from the Plastic-ene; 
• Tsing, A L (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press; 
• Parikka J (2015) The Anthrobscene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; 
• Norgaard, Richard B. (2013) “Escaping economism, escaping the econocene.” Economy of Sufficiency. Wuppertal: Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy: 44-52.
• Hornborg, Alf. (2015) “The political ecology of the Technocene: Uncovering ecologically unequal exchange in the world-system.” In The Anthropocene and the global environmental crisis, pp. 57-69. Routledge; 
• Glikson, A Y (2017). The Plutocene: Blueprints for a post-anthropocene greenhouse earth. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 
• Crutzen, P.J. and Stoermer, E.F. (2000), The Anthropocene: IGBP Global Change Newsletter, v. 41, p. 17–18. 
• Latour B (2013) Agency at the time of the Anthropocene. New Literary History Vol. 45, pp. 1-18, 2014; 
• Mirzoeff, N. (2014) Visualising the Anthropocene. Public Culture 26(2) 213-232.; 
• Mbembe, A (2015) Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive. Talk given at the University of Witwatersand, 22 April, 2015.; 
• Turpin E (ed) (2013) Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press; 
• Yusoff K (2013) Geologic life: prehistory, climate, futures in the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31(5): 779 – 795. 
• Ruddiman, William F. (2003) “The anthropogenic greenhouse era began thousands of years ago.” Climatic change 61, no. 3: 261-293 
• Steffen, W, Grinevald J, Crutzen P, and McNeil J (2011). “The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369, no. 1938: 842-867.

On Pothumanism and New/Neo-Materialism anchored in Feminist, Queer and Critical Race Theories

There is a risk of Posthuman New/Neo-materialism reifying a colonial logic: scholars have been criticized for failing to highlight differences among humans and downplay issues of race/gender/sexuality – so it is important to infuse these schools of thought with Feminist, Queer, Critical Race Theories. 

• A simple overview of New Materialism (on Global Society Theory);
• Sencindiver, S. Y. (2017). New materialism. Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory.
• Haraway, D. (2006). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late 20th century. In The international handbook of virtual learning environments (pp. 117-158). Springer, Dordrecht; (matter is “chthonic”).
• Saldanha, A. (2006) Re-ontologising race: The machinic geography of phenotype. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24: 9–24; 
• Shomura, C. (2017) Exploring the promise of new materialisms. Lateral, 6.1 (Spring); 
• Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21(1): 33-47.; 
• Tompkins, K.W. (2016) On the limits and promise of new materialist philosophy. Lateral, 5.1 (Spring).; 
• Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Durham NC: Duke University Press; 
• DeLanda, M. (2006)  A New Philosophy of Society. London and New York: Continuum; 
• Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter.  Durham NC: Duke University Press; 
• Fox, N.J, and Alldred, P. (2017) Sociology and the New Materialism.  London: Sage; 
• Jackson, Z. I. (2013) Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism. Feminist Studies 39(9); 
• Puar, J.K. (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press; 
• Van der Tuin, I. and Dolphijn, R. (2010). The transversality of new materialism. Women: A Cultural Review, 21(2), 153-171

On Alternative Futures / Prefigurative politics

On Prefigurative politics (e.g., on living the change you wish to see and being  “conscientious objectors” to the dominant neoliberal system) 

• Ladha, A (2018) From green growth to post-growth. TruthOut; 
• Ladha, A (2020) Conscious capitalism is an alibi and an apology for our existing paradigm. DoubleBlind. 
• Watch: Ladha, A., (2020) Sacred activism and being of place. Local Futures; 
• Engler, M and Engler, P (2014) Should we fight the system or be the change? Open Democracy; 
• Freire, P. (2014) Pedagogy of Hope. Written in 1992 to elaborate on Pedagogy of the Oppressed with a focus on hope; 
• Parla, A, (2019) Critique without a politics of hope in Fassin, D and Harcourt, B (2019) A time for critique; 
• Books in the genres of: Afrofuturism; Feminist futures; Disability futures; and see Global Social Theory’s page on Decolonial Speculative Fiction & Fantasy.

On decolonial / postcolonial theory:

• Castro-Gómez, S. (2005) The Hubris of Zero Point: Science, Race, and Illustration in the New Granada (1750–1816); 
• Bhambra, G. and de Sousa Santos, B. (2017) Introduction: Global  Challenges for Sociology; 
• Frantz, F. (1995). Wretched of the Earth; 
• Choudhury, B. (2016); Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Decolonising the Mind. In Reading Postcolonial Theory (pp. 63-82). Routledge India; 
• Bhabha, H. K. (2012). The commitment to theory. In The location of culture (pp. 59-87). Routledge; 
• Césaire, A. (2001). Discourse on colonialism. NYU Press; 
• Mamdani, M. (2018). Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton University Press; 
• Connell, R. (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge Production; 
• Comaroff, J and Comaroff, J (2016). Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa. Routledge;
• Bayly, S. (2016) “Colonialism/Postcolonialism”, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology.

On resilient societies (Animism, Indigeneity, Gaia, Non/pre-dualism):

For overviews and critiques of the Ontological turn; “Perspectivism”; “Multi-Naturalism” and “Animism”, see: 

• Bessire, L, and Bond D. (2014) “Ontological anthropology and the deferral of critique.” American ethnologist 41, no. 3: 440-456; 
• Costa, L, and Carlos F. (2010) “The return of the animists: Recent studies of Amazonian ontologies.” Religion and Society 1, no. 1: 89-109;
• Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich (2010) “The emergence of multispecies ethnography.” Cultural anthropology 25, no. 4: 545-576;
• Ramos, A R. (2012) “The politics of perspectivism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 481-494; 
• Chao, S. (2018) “In the shadow of the palm: Dispersed ontologies among Marind, West Papua.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 4 : 621-649;
• Ingold, T. (2013) “Anthropology beyond humanity.” Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 38, no. 3; 
• Kohn, E. (2013) How forests think. University of California Press; 
• Tsing, A L. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press; 
• Kirksey, E, (2014) ed. The multispecies salon. Duke University Press; Viveiros de Castro, E. (1996) “Images of nature and society in Amazonian ethnology.” Annual review of Anthropology 25, no. 1: 179-200; 
• see “Historical Ecology” literature which seeks to dereify concepts of nature/culture, e.g. Rival, L (2006). “Amazonian historical ecologies.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12: S79-S94; 
• See important debates around the Gaia hypothesis; Luisetti, F. (2017). Decolonizing Gaia or, Why the Savages Shall Fear Bruno Latour’s Political Animism. 61-70; Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia: Eight lectures on the new climatic regime. John Wiley & Sons.

On cultural myth:

• A great example of using myth to develop new connections/meanings is: Cave, D. (1993) Mircea Eliade’s vision for a new humanism. Oxford University Press, 1993. Cave picks up and develops Eliade’s idea of a “new humanism” for modern culture. Eliade anticipated a modern culture (devoid of spirituality, demythologized, and overly material) developing renewed meaning through a restoration of archetypal myths/symbols. Eliade called this recovery of meaning a “new humanism” of existential meaning and cultural-religious unity, putting forward a radically pluralistic vision to bring people together; 
• See how narrative change practitioners talk about the importance of using myths to change people’s understandings of reality (their values, relationships and identities):  Wise Owl Communications, (2022) A case for the banality of myth.