Animist Time and the White Anthropocene

Abstract

This article considers the Western civilisational ethos of the human person as an ethos of mastery with respect to the natural world. The age of climate disaster has begun to turn this ethos into an object for thought, as is evidenced by an increasing number of eco-poetic and eco-philosophical writings and reflections that seek to re-think or un-think prevailing Western construals of the human. My own entry point into the conversation is through Afro-diasporic knowledge systems that evidence construals of the human being not rooted in the Western paradigm of the individual. I ask how such knowledge systems help us to achieve a necessary thought revolution with respect to the current dangers of our technological civilisation (particularly climate disaster and capitalist extractivism). I emphasise the fact that animist thinking systems have for centuries, due to the violences of modernity, existed in a parallel space and time to what I call 'capitalist time' and propose that the failures and crises of Western industrial/technological civilisation warrant renewed examinations of their benefits in human living practices.