On Decolonizing the Anthropocene

Abstract

This article mobilizes a decolonial critique of the Anthropocene. It argues for a certain epistemic disobedience to what, conceptually and politically, the Anthropocene seeks to legitimate. The article counterposes recent critical and global governance epistemologies, which summon the Anthropocene as a new humanist and statist moment for universal politics, against plural, parochial forms of relational, nonstatist affirmation. Hegemonic governance imaginaries that invoke universalist and naturalizing rationales are shown to reproduce colonial logics. The article argues for marginalized and systematically ignored forms of earthbound relationality that evidence long-standing political and ontological means for responding to modernity’s ecological and social harms. Earthbound and rooted life worlds can affirm ecological responsibility and coconstitution otherwise. Two examples are presented: one from Afro-Caribbean geographies and another from Anishinaabe legal scholarship. Together they evidence enduring ecological reciprocities that unsettle and refuse the totalizing rationalities invoked by Anthropocene horizons.