immanence

How best to characterize the past decade in books? This list focuses on three themes: attempts to grapple with the nature of the climate and extinction crises, the “ontological” and “decolonial” “turns” in cultural and environmental theory, and efforts to map out the “multispecies entanglements” that characterize our world and the acute challenges we face.

The original version of the list below was expanded (on December 21) from 30 to 45 based on crowd-sourced suggestions of what was missing and belated reckonings that I had missed some key works. It is not meant to be exhaustive; it is more of a mapping of relevant areas represented by selected titles.

Ten years ago, I posted an article on this blog with the exact same title as this one. It was enjoyable, at the time, to create a list of ten books I found both most personally influential and most significant in the intersectional study of ecology and culture. The list resonated fairly widely, attracting one of the highest number of visits on the blog to that point. (The blog looked different back then; you can see that in a screen shot here.)

Reviewing that list today, I can reaffirm the significance of each of its “top ten,” even if my ordering might be different in retrospect. Arturo Escobar’s Territories of Difference (second on that list) strikes me as the most forward-looking in terms of how it anticipated the most important stream of ecocultural thinking over the past ten years (the decolonial, though that term covers a great deal of complexity, which I will touch on below). Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (#4) is, of the ten, the book that has appeared on the greatest number of reading lists and graduate theses since then, in the areas that I read and advise in. And while the book I listed in first place, William Connolly’s Neuropolitics, has perhaps not aged as well as some of Connolly’s other books (so much has been written about “neuropolitics” since then), its intervention at the time of its writing was substantial and the author’s ongoing productivity merits great respect.

It’s not as easy to write a similar list today, in part because of the dynamics of the “present moment”: this year, in particular, with its global pandemic, its racial-justice convulsions, and its political insanity (here in the United States) has left me with a certain abyssal feeling of the loss of bearings. Can anyone today feel confident that they know what’s going on and what the future holds? (Other than that things will get much worse before they get any better.)

That may be another way of saying: welcome to the world of the shaken, the throttled, the disjointed, unmasked (Covid aside), and violated. Postmodernism, at least in its more theological forms, had gestured toward this kind of sentiment a few decades ago, but that became a passing, and mostly forgettable, fad. Today, it may be decolonialism that gestures in a similar direction, at the risk perhaps of becoming tomorrow’s passed fad. (I hope not.) The more important point is that no one should any longer harbor the illusion that academe holds the keys to much of anything.

That said, intellectual thought, especially that produced at the confluence of ecological and cultural concerns, remains intensely relevant and helpful for showing a way out of our present societal, even civilizational, morass. That’s what I intend to capture with the list below.

How, then, to characterize the past decade? In the territory covered by the term “ecocultural theory” — in which I include the “environmental humanities” and the numerous fields inhabited by ecocritical approaches to recognizing the scope and scale of our ecological situation, but also the fields that aim to understand how human cultural practices intersect with and mutually affect the “more than human” world of ecological systems and biological relations (anthropology, geography, some kinds of philosophy) — this decade has been shaped by three main threads of thinking and creative practice:

1. Attempts to grasp the world-encompassing totality of the climate and extinction crises: This includes debates over the naming of the “Anthropocene,” the place of capitalism and neoliberalism within it, and articulations of the “deep time” of human relations with the geological, earthly, and chthonic beyond that preceded us and will outlast us. Here we find efforts to scope out what it means to live at, or even after, the “end of the world” (note how the phrase repeats itself in the book list below), in a time of epistemic violence, great derangement, species loss, deaths of civilization and even of the “posthuman,” and all the loss, grief, mourning, rage, and other emotions conjured up at the intersections of geology, history, and the colonial and capitalist petrocultures, militarisms, and technofutures that collectively mark the world today.

2. Debates over the ontological nature of the multiplicity of the human, and the need to decolonize our understandings of that multiplicity: Sparked in part by the previous decade’s calls for an “ontological turn,” and connected intimately to the decolonial thread in all its forms — Indigenous, anti-racist, Black, women of color, global South, transnational, et al. — that has come to define so much of the current moment, these debates have involved the recognition of differences that are not merely “cultural,” but are now taken to be something more like differences of “world” or reality itself. They are differences of “world-making” and of the “cosmopolitics” by which multiple worlds clash and intersect, not merely as subjects (agents) and objects (victims) of the present global conjuncture, but as co-agents of deeper historical entanglements with ecology, materiality, biology, and cosmology in its political, affective, and imaginal contours.

3. Finally, on the more hopeful side are the richly empirical and ethnographic efforts to map out the “multispecies” “entanglements” of the cultural and natural, material and discursive, as they connect, disconnect, and reconnect in myriad ways: Many of these efforts have engaged with the so-called “new materialist” turn in its speculative, relational, object-oriented, animist, enactive/affective, and other forms, while others have intersected with the “posthuman” turn in both its “more-than-human” and “transhuman” varieties. Others are simply part of the long tradition by which artists and philosophers continually rediscover the sheer delight of life in its biological, animated (and animist) exuberance. The animal, viral, fungal, microbial, vegetal, bodily, crystalline, watery, oceanic, elemental, and darkly and brightly ecological — all of these and more provoke creative engagements that continue to challenge our thinking about what constitutes the world and our many possible placings within it.

That covers a lot of terrain (arguably, a decade’s worth if not more). The following list of books present key moments and reference points within these three intersecting streams. It’s a very personal list, a snapshot or meteorological reading of my own thinking around the world’s shifting ecocultural coordinates, and I beg forgiveness in advance for leaving out so many other books that deserve to be read and discussed. I welcome reminders of what’s missing, or votes of support, in the comments below.

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The list: Ten Books of the Decade

1. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015) – If Aldo Leopold began the trend of “thinking like a mountain,” I think it was Tsing who arguably elicited the trend of thinking like a fungus (though Deleuze and Guattari initiated it some years ago). The difference from Leopold is that Tsing is an anthropologist who realizes that to think like a fungus, in a world of transnational capitalism, is to think both diffractively and politically across densely tangled networks. Tsing’s work has been a barometer of cutting-edge thinking in environmental anthropology, and this beautifully written book on mushrooms, forests, science, economy, ecology, “peri-capitalism,” and the “end of the world” deserves all the accolades it’s gotten.

2. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013) – Kohn’s book brought Peircian (bio)semiotics to a wider world (which made it especially relevant to my fields of theory), but more importantly it connects the “ontological turn” of current anthropology with rigorous thinking about what a forest, a society, and communication are and how they alter the very notion of what it means to be human. Other books on the sociality of forests, fungi, plants, and other nonhumans may be much more approachable, but the stakes in Kohn’s game are higher and more satisfying, if you’re willing to do the work for it.

3. Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin with the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016) – Haraway remains a giant in the world of cultural theory and this is arguably her most satisfying and engrossing book in several years — rich in theoretical provocation and in ethnographic texture, and suffused with an intelligence that works its way from the midst of all the muddles and “troubles” of our time to indicate directions for movement and creative action.

4. Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (Duke University Press, 2015) – If the complicated dynamic between indigenous and non-indigenous (capitalist, “developmental”) worlds has become a key point of focus for ecocultural research, this beautiful ethnography crystallizes how one can respectfully and craftily navigate the local and global ecotones of that boundary. Where others like Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, Aníbal Quiijano, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Arturo Escobar have mapped out the theoretical contours of Latin American decolonial thought, de la Cadena puts it into play in the nuanced cosmopolitical borderlands of real (Andean) people and communities and the political-ecological (and cosmological) worlds they traverse. It is a beautifully written, model ethnography.

5. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (translated by Catherine Porter, Harvard University Press, 2013) – The most hefty and ambitious tome from one of the most widely recognized scholars alive, this volume attempts to turn modernity’s unspoken theoretical assumptions inside-out in ways that are utterly relevant to how we understand the human (and cultural), the beyond-human (including the ecological, though not restricted to it), and the relationships betwixt and between them as they fall into so many “modes of existence” (a term of art he takes from Etienne Souriau, whose homecoming is long deserved within contemporary theory). Latour’s reframing has not necessarily reshaped the theoretical landscape — it is in some ways too demanding a read (and at the same time too impishly Latourian) to have had that kind of impact — but the challenge and provocation it offers to the usual carving up of disciplines and categories is well worth the effort. (Honorable mentions: any of the massive and colorful art-exhibition/anthologies Latour has edited or co-edited over the years, of which two, Reset Modernity! and Critical Zones, fit our decadal timeline, the latter just barely.)

6. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) – A growing number of books by Indigenous intellectuals make a case against colonialism (or settler colonialism, or dispossession, or white supremacist colonial capitalist modernity, et al.) and for a vibrant and holistic alternative to it, rooted in part in the author’s specific intellectual tradition (Nishnaabeg, in this case) and in part in the situation shared by all such situated accounts. That is what Simpson does, expertly, and it speaks to me in part because her world on the north side of Lake Ontario (Chi’Niibish) is the obverse of the one that I grew up in and spent half my life in as an urban, hyphenated (refugee descendant) Canadian, only gradually coming to grasp that there was another, more place-based and much more deeply rooted one that coexisted alongside mine. That recognition became the impetus for my Master’s thesis, and I welcome the work of those who do it with much deeper authority than I ever could do it today.

7. Nigel Clark, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (Sage, 2010) – This book came out on December 29, 2010, making it too late for the last decade and just in time for this one. There are others that traverse a similar philosophical terrain (a challenging recent one being Frédéric Neyrat’s The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation), but none with the verve and empirical richness of Clark’s book. This book could be said to mark the “geologic” turn in social theory, one that renders concepts like the “Anthropocene” somewhat inadequate for conveying what’s needed at this time in human history.

8. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011) – This book, for many people, put the “slow violence” of the colonial, capitalist, industrial colossus on the map as a cultural fact that was suddenly rendered visible in literature from around the world. It can be seen as in many ways inaugural to the second decade of this century, and its importance endures.

9. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Simon & Schuster, 2014) – While it’s neither a book of theory nor a cultural study, Klein’s mammoth journalistic undertaking both spoke for and cultivated such a wealth of significant activism, making sense (for the broader world) of the anti-pipelines and divestment movements and making the case for what ended up becoming the most prominent direction of environmental politics of the latter half of the decade — the movement for some kind of “Green New Deal.” It remains relevant and inspirational, and is surely a marker of the decade.

10. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) – While I still disagree with key parts of Morton’s OOO-derived thesis (this blog emerged 12 years ago in part as a dialogue with those theorists), I love his ability to capture complexity in provocative whiffs of genius, whose influence on artists like Bjørk and Olafur Eliasson is worth its weight in ecocritical gold. We certainly need a new way of thinking about climate change, and while I don’t think “hyperobjects” is it, it’s a wonderful try and his style of writing and thinking is, as always, exhilarating.

Honorable mentions (let me know what I’ve missed in the comments section below!)

• Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)
• Aaron Allen and Kevin Dawe, Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature (Routledge, 2017)
• Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena, eds., A World of Many Worlds (University of Minnesota Press, 2018)
• Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Polity, 2013)
• Brian Burkhart, Indigenizing Philosophy Through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures (Michigan State University Press, 2019)
• Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (Bloomsbury, 2014)
• Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Duke University Press, 2018)
• Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago Press, 2016)
• Macarena Goméz-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017)
• Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016)
• Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen, The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
• Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020)
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed, 2013)
• Eben Kirksey, ed., The Multispecies Salon (Duke University Press, 2014)
• James Maffie, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion (University Press of Colorado, 2014)
• Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies (MIT Press, 2017)
• Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015)
• Jason Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016)
• Leilani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams, eds., Racial Ecologies (University of Washington Press, 2019)
• Kari Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2011)
• John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
• Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (Columbia University Press, 2018)
• Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (Taylor & Francis, 2014)
• Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy, An Ecotopian Lexicon (University of Minnesota Press, 2019)
• Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016)
• Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)
• Lisa Sideris, Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (University of California Press, 2017)
• Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Duke University Press, 2015)
• Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker, eds., Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (Routledge, 2016)
• Isabelle Stengers, Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science (Wiley, 2017)
• Sarah McFarland Taylor, Ecopiety: Green Media and the Dilemma of Environmental Virtue (New York University Press, 2019)
• Anna L. Tsing, et al., Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
• Thom Van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014)
• Linda Weintraub, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (University of California Press, 2012)
• Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press, 2019)

Best pricey, academic anthologies (besides the ones mentioned above, which are neither too pricey nor too academic): Ursula Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann, eds., Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017); Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomajor, Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020)

Best publisher (tie): Duke University Press and University of Minnesota Press (eight titles each on the above list)

Most anticipated writing: Achille Mbembe on planetary habitability.

Comments and suggestions welcome!