As many of you know, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) has been cancelled. I am a regular attendee and have presented my research there several times. This year, I was set to moderate a panel and present an essay entitled “Postcolonial Thought, Decolonizing the Anthropocene, and Tobias S. Buckell’s Climate Change Novels.” That project is now on hold until I can find the time to put in edits and submit it somewhere. However, I will talk a bit about the research that went into this project. Strap in!
Most of you have seen the dramatic shift in conversation surrounding climate change and this period of human geological influence we’re calling the Anthropocene. Within one of my disciplines — postcolonialism — the conversation has been remarkably more destructive, in part because some within the discipline have begun to question its usefulness in a period of global catastrophe. Perhaps the biggest name in this conversation is Dipesh Chakrabarty, who has taken an interesting philosophical turn in his work in order to address what it means for humans to be a geological force and how we’re meant to make sense of it and address it culturally. Where he’s received the most criticism is in his fairly light-handed dismissal of postcolonial thought (and, by extension, Marxist thought) as overly specified and insufficient to the task of anticipating and addressing the crisis. He’s joined by scholars such as Andrew Baldwin, who similarly argues that postcolonial thought is too focused on the past and too obsessed (my characterization) with historical caricatures of empires, etc. and, therefore, can’t anticipate other forms of difference that might emerge in the future (the “yet-to-come”).
Naturally, I disagree with both of these scholars, especially Chakrabarty’s call for a universal human subject. And I do largely on the grounds that the consolidation of the Anthropocene around a universal human subject only serves to reinforce historical geographies and political control within an imperial system that has never been dismantled. After all, the ones who benefit most from treating this crisis as if it is the universal suffrage of humanity are the same nations that benefited from colonization — and still do. These places will, if granted critical distance from the continued influence on the world, simply reinforce and reproduce the same barriers, borders, resource limitations, and differences they have worked centuries to maintain while smaller nations with a history of direct and indirect colonization will continue to suffer the long term consequences of climate change.
These were some of the arguments I planned to present at ICFA. I also planned to offer a reading of Tobias S. Buckell’s Arctic Rising and Hurricane Fever as counters to this emergent discourse within postcolonial and Anthropocene circles. In general, his work has always countered this by putting an emphasis on Caribbean (and other historically colonized) voices in traditionally western genres — space opera for his Xenowealth novels and the eco-thriller in his climate change novels. In this respect, I think his work is a perfect vehicle for talking about how to decolonize the rhetoric surrounding the Anthropocene and revitalize postcolonial thought. Indeed, I think it is necessary for us to do so, because reproducing the past in the yet-to-come will do nothing to change the systems that got us to this point in the first place.
So, what have you been working on?
