New Literary History· 2012Q1
Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change
- 648citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2012year
Short summary
Climate change science necessitates rethinking the human figure beyond postcolonial concepts of the rights-bearing citizen or the deconstructed "subject under erasure."
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Climate change foregrounds human beings' collective geological agency.
- Postcolonial figures of the human (rights-bearing citizen, subject under erasure) are insufficient for the Anthropocene.
- Imagining the human in the Anthropocene requires thinking on multiple, incommensurable scales simultaneously.
- The article advocates for a disjunctive association of these multiple figures of the human.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
This article begins by describing how the figure of the human has been thought in anticolonial and postcolonial writing—as that of the rights-bearing citizen and as the “subject under erasure” of deconstructive thinking, respectively. The essay then goes on to show how the science of climate change foregrounds the idea of human beings’ collective geological agency in determining the climate of the planet, a move that makes the other two figures not redundant but inadequate to the task of imagining the human in the age of the Anthropocene. The article ends by arguing the necessity of our having to think of the human on multiple and incommensurable scales simultaneously, keeping all the three figures of the human in disjunctive association with one another.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. New Literary History, 2012 · DOI ↗
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Field: Literature and Literary Theory
Literature and Literary TheoryArts and Humanities