The Waking Desert: When Non-Places Become Events

Abstract

Philosopher and anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli is the author of several books criticising multicultural late liberalism in Australia and the United States. Over the past few years she has created the Karrabing Film Collective with Indigenous people from Northern Australia to produce short experimental narrations filmed using smart phones, partly improvised and inspired by what she calls the animist strategy. This article discusses how, in Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Povinelli articulates her figure of Animism, with two others, the Desert and the Virus, so as to portray the projections of the life and death of humanity within our current geological era that some call or denounce as the Anthropocene.