History 4°
Postcolonial Method and Anthropocene Time
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8097158 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ian Baucom (Duke University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 123-142 |
| Publication date | 2014-02-17 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2052-2614 • E-ISSN: 2052-2622 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/pli.2013.13 |
| OpenAlex | W2072407103 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 15 |
| References cited | 15 |
The essay opens by situating Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent work on climate change and the anthropocene (the new geological period of time in which humans have become a planet-reshaping “force of nature”) together with a broader contemporary discourse on the human/nonhuman in relation to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean Paul Sartre’s 1960s debate on the nature of history and the dialectic. Although not explicitly advanced under the sign of that debate, these recent discourses, I suggest, share and extend some of its crucial features, taking something from both sides. From Sartre: the call for a search for critical method adequate to addressing Marx’s observation that we make our own history, but not under circumstances of our own choosing. From Lévi-Strauss: the argument that “history” is inadequately addressed by the “historian’s code,” that the situation of our time encompasses multiple scales and orders of time: most significantly, an array of “extra-historical,” “infra-historical,” and “supra-historical” registers of human/nonhuman time. From there, I return to Chakrabarty, to discuss the ways in which his work takes up those twin challenges. I pursue this reading by considering the relation between his earlier conceptualization (in Provincializing Europe ) of History 1 and History 2 and the new theory of history emerging from his work on climate change, which I call History 3. I conclude by suggesting that despite its enormously rich considerations of the multiscaled temporality of the anthropocene, Chakrabarty’s recent work also sometimes bends the time of climate linear in the progress toward catastrophe, thereby bypassing the full possibility of a multitemporal ontology of the present that would include the persistence into the anthropocene of History 1 and 2. I suggest, therefore, that while drawing on his recent work, we need to continue in a search for a method adequate to the situation of our time; a time that knots together (minimally) Histories 1, 2, and 3; a time that I am provisionally calling History 4°
Aesthetics · Anthropocene · Argument (complex analysis · Conceptualization · Deep time · Dialectic · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Philosophy of history · Relation (database · Sign (mathematics · Sociology · Temporality · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Geology
Infectious Liberty
The Open Veins of Modernity
Contemporary Studies Network Roundtable
Late Nineteenth-Century Adventure Fiction and the Anthropocene
SF, Infrastructure, and the Anthropocene
About time
Touchstones for Sustainable Development
Fast slow
The Sea, Not the Ocean
Fin du Globe
Conjectures on world energy literature
Colonial coal and peripheral modernity
Modernity's dirt
The "baboon boy" of the Eastern Cape and the making of the human in South Africa
Plant knowledge
| Unique citing works | 15 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,5 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2026 (11) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 14 |