Being against the Anthropocene

Book Review| November 01 2020 Being against the Anthropocene Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, by Demos, T. J., Berlin: Sternberg, 2017, 132 pages, $20.90 (paperback), ISBN 978-3956792106 Saswat Samay Das; Saswat Samay Das Saswat Samay Das is associate professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Snigdha Mondal; Snigdha Mondal Snigdha Mondal is a senior research scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Deepak Mathew Deepak Mathew Deepak Mathew is a senior research scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Cultural Politics (2020) 16 (3): 412–414. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8593609 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Saswat Samay Das, Snigdha Mondal, Deepak Mathew; Being against the Anthropocene. Cultural Politics 1 November 2020; 16 (3): 412–414. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8593609 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCultural Politics Search Advanced Search In this book T. J. Demos, professor of art history and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, characterizes the Anthropocene as an abstract concept that offers a reductive approach to understanding humanity. As Demos makes evident, the label Anthropocene seems to be a manipulative construct of capitalism designed to assimilate, control, and mask the differential nature of humanity. In contrast, Demos, an art historian and cultural critic, depicts humanity as a vibrating field of differences that is reluctant to express itself as oneness. Through this insistence Demos enables us to see how capitalist interests appropriate the universalizing logic of the Anthropocene to blame humanity in its entirety as responsible for environmental devastation brought about by the capitalists, the corporations, and the petrochemical industries. According to Demos, it is necessary to resist obscuring corporate accountability by partaking in an overarching narrative like... © 2020 Duke University Press2020 You do not currently have access to this content

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