Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene ed. by Anna L. Tsing et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene ed. by Anna L. Tsing et al. Elexis Trinity Williams Tsing, Anna L., Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, eds. Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. Playful disorientation is perhaps your first hint: this is not scholarship as usual. A white page opens on the cluttered desktop landscape of the computer screen, populated by colorful illustrations of fire, kudzu, and an emerald ash borer. One is compelled by the visual sensuality of the experience to sit with it for a moment, to "stay with the trouble," as Donna Haraway (2016) might say, of exploring the patchy problematics of the Anthropocene. Attending to the materiality of land, water, and atmosphere-transforming projects, this transdisciplinary anthology centers four historical concurrences at the intersection of human and nonhuman activity, described as "Anthropocene Detonators": invasion, empire, capital, and acceleration. Here there be monsters, certainly, but perhaps also opportunities for responsiveness and responsibility. One encounters, mingling on the landing page, a host of feral entities in motion: toxic fog, antibiotics, comb jellies, anti-fouling paint, bee villains. Each is associated with one of the four detonators that structure the project. These focal points are accompanied by one of 79 field reports representing a window into a different multispecies ecology that proliferates in the intermingling trails of human infrastructures and nonhuman entities. In the upper left-hand corner, an illustrated master key directs the reader to an index of related cases and concepts. It is a feature which contributes to the sense in which the project registers as an atlas, further articulating its virtual spatiality by introducing a reading room in which texts and other [End Page 719] media are organized by type and conceptual analytic. Among these analytic frames, one finds Tippers—described as "modes of infrastructure-mediated state change"1—and Feral Qualities, which identify ecologies and entities that flourish in the context of human disturbance, proliferating in toxic environments or stowing away in industrial infrastructures. Such qualities are identified by their compatibility and potential for imagining otherwise, with rather than against the realities of the Anthropocene. Click on the mobile icon of dry, cracking ground titled "ghost water," for example, and you will be drawn deeper into iterations of the linked concepts of smoothness and speed in relationship to empire. These elements of change are used to structure explorations of the myriad processes by which the "smooth surfaces of land and water have enabled colonial governance and industrial development [sponsoring]…more than human invasions" and accelerating processes which open "portals for feral effects, and [block] the healing of local ecologies by denying them time" for more subtle adaptations.2 Drawing together transport infrastructure, water, and state power within the framework of the non-innocent but potential-bearing effects of technoscientific acceleration in this one strand, the reader moves beyond the analytic limitations of the "entity" itself toward a layered, polyphonic inquiry of the relations which occur among human projects, living, and nonliving beings. This, we are to understand as a function of reading the dynamic intersection of smoothness and speed as a Tipper. Grounded in a particular time and place, each of the Tippers represents analytic meditations on the relational processes by which infrastructural efforts shape change. Like the choose-your-own-adventure novels of the 1980s, Feral Atlas teases its possibilities and structures its interactive experience so that you may play with its pieces however you choose, but the concepts are all embedded in rich relations of multispecies complexity and transformation. As both readers and players in this visual entanglement, we are invited to explore what it means to map, interpret, or intervene in the ruination and the promise of the Anthropocene—its infrastructural effects and the opportunities for imagining otherwise that lay deep in the weeds (or the semi-wilds) where human tracks are everywhere evident but do not dominate the landscape of the possible. Beyond its layered interface and the hypertextual user experience, one finds in Feral Atlas something of a guide to the places, processes, and interactions by which feral ecologies spring up. It is an accessible tool for disciplining...