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Unpacking the Whiteness of the Anthropocene

Maija Linturi analyzes the acknowledgment of a billion black Anthropocenes.

Author: Maija Linturi

Time of the Anthropos. Image Source: The Anthropocene-Fallacy: Learning from Wrong Ideas

In all its naive assumptions the Anthropocene suggests that the people who started it didn’t quite understand what they were doing. They went on expeditions, conquered, innovated, and responded to the frontier spirit of their time. It is widely assumed the destructiveness of the Anthropocene is thus an unfortunate but unforeseeable byproduct of the actions committed in the past. The untruthfulness of this claim unravels when Kathryn Yusoff examines the proposed origin stories for the Anthropocene – the so-called Golden Spikes in her seminal book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018).

At the outset, Yusoff criticises the term Anthropocene to name the current geological era (Yusoff 2018).[1] First, the criticism is pointed at the human-centrism of the term. At the same time while trying to underline the destructive consequences of human action to the Earth, the Anthropocene reinforces the idea of man, the Anthropos, as a superior being. Secondly, the Anthropocene doesn’t specify who were the exact people who wreaked havoc. The blame is placed on humankind and the destructiveness becomes a characteristic of our species. In the same vein, other scholars have made similar remarks and proposed alternative terms: Capitalocene, Plantatiocene, Chthulucene, etc. Their aim is to be more precise with what kind of system caused the destruction, or to describe the nature of it. Yusoff, however, is not satisfied with these alternatives.

‘Golden Spike’ is a term used to describe a moment when a geological era turns into another. There are several suggestions for the Golden Spikes of the Anthropocene: 1610, the beginning of a transatlantic colonialism; 1800, the start of the industrial revolution ie. massive coal burning; and 1950s, the Great Acceleration and the era of nuclear bomb testing. Others have also suggested 1452, the foundational year of the first colonial sugar cane plantation that used imported slave labor.

All the suggested Golden Spikes are established not only on the large-scale exploitation of the environment but also on the exploitation and genocide of black and indigenous people. Besides being the direct victims of the so-called Anthropocene, they have also been the forced executors of it: the carriers of pathogens, slave labor on plantations, workers in coal mines. For other than white folks, the Anthropocene and its extinctions have always been the present reality. Thus to claim that there was a kind of innocent incomprehensiveness in the actions of the people who caused the suggested Golden Spikes is a fundamentally racist remark.

The problem with the term Anthropocene isn’t that it packs all the people in the same boat but that it automatically excludes the ones from whose flesh the Anthropocene is built from the entire definition of the human. According to Yusoff, race is the anchor of the modern world. The Anthropos is not just any kind of human being but the only kind recognized by the historical, humanistic idea of Man: absolutely white.

As such, Yusoff rejects the suggested alternatives for the Anthropocene, since they do not acknowledge the significance of race any more than the Anthropocene. Instead Yusoff calls for unpacking the inherent structural whiteness of the Anthropocene. For them, it is necessary to center what has always been at its core, the race – the acknowledgment of a billion black Anthropocenes.

Notes

1. Yusoff, Kathryn. “Golden Spikes and Dubious Origins.” In A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Ecological Thinking

This is the course blog for K-JI-11-23A – Ecological Thinking. In 2023-24, we explore “Vertical Ecologies” by visual arts, film and performance. The course is co-organized by Giovanna Esposito Yussif and Samir Bhowmik. Previously, in 2022-23, we organized a year-long collaborative research studio with Aarhus University, DK, Research Pavilion 2023 and Helsinki Biennial 2023 on the themes of environmental data, sensing and contamination.

Header image credit: Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka / Seed, Image, Ground (2020)- With permission from the authors.

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