Those interested in the Anthropo(S)cene thread (technically, a “category”) of this blog may be interested in the call for proposals for a special issue of Radical History Review on Alternatives to the Anthropocene. (Hat tip to Jeremy Schmidt at The Anthropo.Scene.) The call reads, in part:
By “alternatives to the Anthropocene,” we invite discussion of at least three connected topics: the Anthropocene as a technocratic, scientific designation of our current epoch; the limits of this approach to periodizing the last 500 years; and the social movements that have challenged the extractive capitalism essential to this epoch. The issue thus presumes that the Anthropocene resulted not simply from world-changing technological innovations like the steam engine. Rather, it resulted from multiple political defeats that consolidated capitalist and colonialist modernity [emphasis added]. We invite contributions that highlight struggles for environmental, social, and technological alternatives to the forces that produced the Anthropocene. Essays should examine these histories of resistance that might construct fruitful genealogies for the present environmental crisis and produce a more open and political reading of environmental history.
We seek submissions that offer new insights into what Joan Martinez Alier and Ramachandra Guha call “the environmentalism of the poor,” which has resisted the colonial, capitalist histories that have wrought epochal environmental destruction. How would environmental history transform if we centered the environmentalism of the poor? What are the cultural and political expressions of such environmentalisms in diverse historical and geographic circumstances? What continuities link movements across time and space? We welcome contributions on any time period. We particularly seek work that contests dominant readings of the Anthropocene as a post-1800 phenomenon and centers environmental history that examines the beginning of the era of European colonial expansion.
The full call is here.
I emphasized the line about “multiple political defeats” because I find this to be a novel way of discussing the emergence of “capitalist and colonialist modernity.” The latter is one of a series of acceptable variations for describing the “system” responsible for the the “Orbis spike” (1610) version of the Anthropocene, but that system is more often considered victorious due to its own inherent characteristics — furiously competing maritime empires, an immunologically invasive “portmanteau biota,” advantageous weaponry, and so on — than due to the failures of those who resisted it.
By identifying “environmental, social, and technological alternatives to the forces that produced the Anthropocene” with Martinez Alier’s and Guha’s “environmentalism of the poor,” we get, on the one hand, a (dramatically) oversimplified account of history but, on the other, a useful framework for considering the scope and strength of alternatives available today.
It’s oversimplified because, of course, the “resistance” to “capitalist and colonialist modernity” was neither unified nor particularly coherent when that constellation of forces was spreading most rapidly around the world. But it’s useful if it helps us reimagine the scope of alternatives and ways forward today, and I think the journal call intends to do exactly that. Instead of Marxist class analysis or some overarching world-systems analysis, we have “modes of resistance of diverse ‘environmentalisms of the poor,'” the “excavation” of “overlooked popular environmentalisms” and “alternative modes of production,” and multiple other “resistance movements” with their “alternative genealogies.” (Next stop: Pluriverse, with all the decolonial threads growing into and out of that set of discourses.)
I take this call as an indication of how the framing of “alternatives” is changing (and how the Foucauldian poststructuralist language of genealogies, resistance movements, and alternative modernities has become part of the air we breathe). Remember how recently Fredric Jameson is said to have said, or heard, that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? We are, I think, in the midst of an epistemic shift that would make it easier, even if we’re not sure yet what will come out the other end.
