5

Decolonizing the Anthropocene

Cheryl McEwan

Introduction
The idea of the Anthropocene—the naming of a current situation in which
human activity rivals “some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the
functioning of the Earth system” (Steffen et al. 2011, 843)—captures a
moment of dual crisis: the unfolding global ecological catastrophe and the
ever-impending collapse of capital. The growing realization in the global
North that capitalism and the conditions of the Anthropocene no longer cre-
ate the conditions for life (Tsing 2015) represents a profound unsettling of the
philosophical foundations underpinning ideas about modernity and progress.
However, for millions of people around the world, this is nothing new, since
colonized peoples have experienced this reality since the advent of capitalism
(McEwan 2019). Yet the idea of the Anthropocene rests on the notion that an
essential human nature has created the current crisis. This ignores the role of
systems, such as colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy, that a small minority
of humans created and “other humans powerfully resisted” (Klein 2016, 12;
also Chakrabarty 2014), and erases the racialized history of extractive colo-
nialism that has given rise to this form of globalism (Yusoff 2019; McKittrick
2013). As Ghosh (2017) argues, the very idea of a ‘stable Holocene’ preceding

C. McEwan (*)
Durham University, Durham, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 77

D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_5
78 C. McEwan

an unruly Anthropocene is a bourgeois ideal that was never a reality for those
exploited by colonialism/capitalism/patriarchy. Thus, a concept that is defin-
ing the future of the planet actively erases the historical and contemporary
experiences of most of its inhabitants.
In response, this chapter discusses the significance of decolonizing the
Anthropocene and the challenges this poses, in particular, for postcolonial
theory. It discusses the ways in which postcolonial theory problematizes the
Eurocentrism of and the epistemic violence created by framing the
Anthropocene as a universalizing and silencing concept. It also accounts for
the difficulties that the Anthropocene, and the requirement to theorize human
and non-human futures at the planetary scale, present for postcolonial schol-
ars. These difficulties are, of course, not unique to postcolonial theory. While
evidence that humans live on the brink of environmental catastrophe is all
around, the sheer complexity and scale of the contemporary crisis mean that
abilities to envision survival in and life afterwards are profoundly impaired.
Writing in a radically different moment of crisis in 1918, Ernst Bloch articu-
lates this occluded vision: “we are located in our own blind spot, in the dark-
ness of the lived moment, whose darkness is ultimately our own darkness”
(1918, 200). For Bloch, navigating out of the ‘darkness’ required utopian
thought experiments, which he went on to develop in his later works, that
sought to reconcile nature and humankind through socialism.
The scale and complexity of the current ecological crisis present enormous
challenges for creating knowledge about possible future forms of life and
dwelling. Yet creating this knowledge is a task of extreme urgency.
Contemporary scholars are attempting to find creative ways out of the blind
spot by theorizing an ethos of life in the anticipated ruins of capitalism and by
engaging a planetary scale for thinking about presents and futures that is more
attuned to the materiality of life, including ecological and non-human
demands (Haraway 2016; Tsing 2015; Tsing et al. 2017). However, the
Eurocentrism of the Anthropocene remains a significant occlusion in current
thinking and consequently, following the pattern of earlier forms of creative
thinking on the brink of catastrophe, threatens to limit creativity by falling
prey to visions of domination, ever more meticulous human-ecology inter-
ventions and even authoritarianism. Donna Haraway’s recent writings, for
example, are a case in point. Haraway (2016, 2018) posits predicted global
population rises over the twenty-first century from 7.8 to 10.9 billion as the
main threat to human and non-human beings. She advocates an ecotopia of
collective, non-coercive, non-racist kinship as an alternative to ‘making more
babies’ to stem this growth and reduce global population to two or three
 5 Decolonizing the Anthropocene 79

billion over a couple of hundred years. However, in outlining a radical mani-

festo for care and valuing life, Haraway does not explain how the planet might
lose eight billion humans over this time span. Ecofascism is, of course, more
forthcoming, and history tells us which people will be dispensed with first and
which will be forcibly denied offspring; ignoring the racial politics of propos-
ing a depopulated world is thus profoundly problematic and dangerous. In
response to such dangers, this chapter suggests that the search for critical and
creative tools for collaborative survival in the Anthropocene also requires
decolonizing theory and praxis. As Dalby (2016, 33) argues, “how the
Anthropocene is interpreted, and who gets to invoke which framing of the
new human age, matters greatly both for the planet and for particular parts of
humanity”.

The Eurocentrism of the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is part of the naming practices of the West. As Sidaway
et al. (2014, 5) argue, the Anthropocene is thoroughly Eurocentric in that it
“is measured and dated in science whose origins are in, and which expresses
the power of, a Western weltanschauung (world-view)”. Scientists are currently
debating the origins of the Anthropocene, but any origin point—1492 and
the conquest of the Americas; 1610 and the Colombian Exchange (the trans-
fer of human populations, plants, animals, cultures, technology and ideas
between the Americas and Europe that was triggered by colonialism and
extraction); the 1800s and the origins of the fossil and plantation economies
that were founded on slavery and drove European industrialization; the 1940s
and nuclear testing (see Chap. 4), first on Japanese cities and subsequently on
Aboriginal lands in Australia, Pacific atolls and native American land in the
Mojave desert—is marked by racial inequalities. The erasure of these histories
in the naming of the present and future as the Anthropocene could be consid-
ered an act of epistemic violence (Yusoff 2019). Talk of the Anthropocene also
erases the existence of human systems that have organized life differently,

systems that insist that humans must think seven generations in the future;
must be not only good citizens but also good ancestors; must take no more than
they need and give back to the land in order to protect and augment styles of
regeneration. These systems existed and still exist, but they are erased every time
we say that the climate crisis is a crisis of ‘human nature’ and that we are living
in the ‘age of man’. (Klein 2016, 12)
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Such erasure forecloses possibilities that these different human systems may
also inform alternative futures. The Anthropocene should not prompt us to
abandon the fundamental concerns of social science and the terrain of postco-
lonialism: the theorization of culture and power. Instead, an “increasing rec-
ognition of the potency of social relations of power to transform the very
conditions of human existence should justify a more profound engagement
with social and cultural theory” (Malm and Hornborg 2014, 63). Importantly,
however, the Anthropocene also justifies a deeper engagement with the cre-
ativity, philosophies and praxis in those marginal spaces that have been cre-
ated historically by hegemonic relationships of power and knowledge.
Inequalities and dispossession have underpinned the advent of the
Anthropocene. The environmental destruction that is currently taking place
has been caused by approximately 25% of the planet’s population; many mil-
lions are not a party to the fossil economy, for example (see Gore 2015). Yet
its effects are felt most keenly by those least responsible, for example, indige-
nous peoples in the Arctic whose territories are literally melting away or small
island states in the Indian and Pacific Oceans whose very existence is threat-
ened by rising sea levels. The latter is beginning to be recognized as a human
rights issue: in a ground-breaking ruling in January 2020 in a case involving a
Kiribati asylum seeker deported by the New Zealand government, the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees ruled that governments must take
into account the human rights violations caused by the climate crisis when
considering deportation of asylum seekers. However, the great majority of the
potential victims of climate change are in Asia and the threats faced here are
stark. According to Ghosh (2017), 125 million people in India and Bangladesh,
and around 10% of the population of Vietnam, could be displaced by rising
sea levels; 24% of India’s arable land is at risk of desertification; 47% of the
world’s population depend on the waters that flow out of the Himalayan ice
sheets, and if the glaciers continue to shrink at current rates, the most popu-
lous parts of Asia will face catastrophic water shortages within the next
10–20 years.
Responses to climate change are dominated by a search for technocratic
solutions rather than addressing inequalities and dispossession, which are
rooted deeply in colonial history and endure powerfully in the present. For
example, a 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
included geoengineering in its calculations and simulations to claim that
injecting millions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere could
help limit global temperature rises (IPCC 2018), thereby legitimizing these
technologies as inevitable. And one of the uglier features of environmentalism
is the insistence by the haves that in order to ‘save the planet’ the have-nots
 5 Decolonizing the Anthropocene 81

should be denied the patterns of life, such as electricity, refrigeration and

transportation, which they themselves take for granted. As Ghosh (2017)
argues, the injustices of colonialism are perpetuated by claims that the poor
should make sacrifices so that the rich can continue to enjoy the fruits of
their wealth.
New forms of Orientalism1 accompany the reverberations of climate
change. In the Middle East and North Africa, for example, violence is caused
by both the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, and the people displaced by
this violence are dehumanized in Western political and popular discourses.
This is especially so if they survive crossing the Sahara Desert and the
Mediterranean Sea to arrive on European shores or at Europe’s borders in
desperate need of refuge. Weizman and Sheikh (2015) trace this violence
across an aridity line that stretches from the Horn of Africa, runs through
Somalia and Ethiopia, and west through Eritrea, Sudan, Northern Nigeria
and Mali, and then east across the coast of North Africa to Gaza, Syria, Iraq,
Iran, Afghanistan and into Pakistan. The line connects places marked by
drought, water scarcity, scorching temperatures and military conflict, and in
which climate change is a profoundly colonial project. These places are also
hotspots for Western drone strikes, which goes largely uncommented upon
because the people living here are discursively dehumanized. As Klein (2016)
argues, bombs following oil and drones following drought fill boats with refu-
gees who are dehumanized. The needs of others for security is cast as a threat
to ‘our’ own security and in response, walls are being built—literally in Israel,
the USA and at the edges of Europe, and symbolically within Britain with its
retreat from the EU, from principles of free movement of people and towards
ever tougher and inhumane immigration policies. Black and brown lives are
valued so little that thousands can be lost at sea—for example, according to a
UN report (Fargues 2017), at least 34,000 people died or went missing
attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa and the Middle
East between 2000 and 2017—or incarcerated in prisons on islands—for
example, Nauru, off the coast of Australia—which themselves are at risk of
slipping beneath the rising seas. As Stoler (2016, 337) argues, “Displaced
peoples have become the ‘toxic’ refuse of our contemporary world”. Terms
like “environmental refugees”—which has no basis in international law,2 is

1
As derived from Edward Said (1978), Orientalism is a Western way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes,
exaggerates and distorts differences of non-European peoples and cultures as exotic, inferior, primitive,
uncivilized and at times dangerous.
2
‘Refugee’ has a strict legal definition pertaining to a person outside of their country who cannot return
because of fear of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a
social group.
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not recognized by those who need to move to survive or by those who move
only short distances, and in countries like the UK and Australia invokes rac-
ism, discrimination and state-sanctioned detention—deflect “from the his-
torical and political conditions that have produced these effects” (ibid.). The
time is ripe for a sustained postcolonial critique of the Anthropocene, but this
may also require a rethinking of postcolonial theory.

Postcolonial Theory and the Anthropocene

Postcolonial theory is concerned with racial power and myriad ways in which
groups of people have been and continue to be designated outside the cate-
gory of the human. In contrast, the Anthropocene calls the category of the
human into question—it is no longer understood as internal to itself (and in
many non-Western cultures it never was) but is a reflection of the totality of
the Earth system. As Baldwin (2017) argues, the Anthropocene is significant
because it gives finality to the blurring of the distinction between Nature and
the Human, which is an artefact of European imperial power. At the same
time, by calling the category of the Human into question, it necessitates
reconsideration of how racial power—the multiple ways in which groups of
people are designated outside the category of the Human—is traced in the
Anthropocene. Despite this, attempts to theorize the Anthropocene have
mostly ignored race. This is problematic because one of the prevalent themes
in debates about the Anthropocene is human survival and contained within
survivability is the biopolitical question of which bodies will be designated as
best suited for survival. These are fundamentally racial questions, which raise
questions about,

whether postcolonial theory is capable of deciphering the politics of otherness

contained within them, and, additionally, whether postcolonial theory is able to
contribute toward a progressive politics capable of responding to the
Anthropocene crisis alongside its resurgent contemporary fascisms. (Baldwin
2017, 294)

Critical geographers and environmental historians have long documented

environmental racism and injustices and their relationship with
(neo)colonialism—for example, the grossly unequal distribution of pollution,
waste disposal and biowaste among impoverished peoples everywhere, or the
egregious practices of multinational corporations, conglomerates and govern-
ments that destroy ecologies, resources and livelihoods. However, little of this
 5 Decolonizing the Anthropocene 83

work has made its way into postcolonial scholarship (Stoler 2016). And
despite growing scholarly concern with the inequalities and dispossession
underpinning the current ecological crisis, postcolonial theory has struggled
to engage critically with the Anthropocene debate. There are three primary
reasons for this.
Firstly, postcolonial theory has found it difficult to engage with political
ecology because of the human-centred focus of postcolonial analysis, its
embeddedness in humanism as a philosophy espousing reason, ethics and
social and economic justice, and its concern with issues such as identity, cul-
tural hybridity, political heterogeneity and epistemology. In contrast, theoriz-
ing the Anthropocene requires an account of how human beings are entangled
in ontological aspects of wider relational and ecological processes.
Secondly, this difficulty relates to the concern of postcolonial theory to
reveal the Other in text by exposing the structures of representation that draw
meaning through references to a colonial past, which presents difficulties in
theorizing contemporary ecological crisis and potential futures. In response,
Stoler (2016) calls for a focus on how the ‘ruins of empire’ endure in the pres-
ent (e.g. in Palestine and Australia and with respect to Native American lands)
and how people live with and in these ruins. The work of indigenous scholars
(e.g. Whyte 2017) is already beginning to fill this gap, arising from memories,
knowledges, histories and experiences of oppression that differ from many
non-indigenous scientists, environmentalists and politicians who are promi-
nent in the framing of the issue of climate change today. Similarly, Baldwin
(2017) argues that engaging with the Anthropocene requires that postcolonial
methodologies shift their temporal gaze towards the future to better come to
terms with the subaltern in formation or the figure of the yet-to-come (e.g.
the racialized figure of the climate change migrant).
Thirdly, the disconnection between theorizing the Anthropocene and post-
colonialism relates to the requirement to theorize both at different scales: the
Anthropocene necessitates theorizing at the planetary scale, while postcolo-
nial theory is focused on the human scale. The requirement to theorize the
Anthropocene at the planetary scale thus also brings the humanism at the
heart of much postcolonial theory into question (see Box 5.1) and also points
to the need for greater engagement with political ecology as a means by which
to resolve the epistemological dilemmas.
Malm and Hornborg point to the differential impact of Hurricane Katrina
in black and white neighbourhoods of New Orleans (see also Crow 2012 for
an autobiographical account of this), or of Hurricane Sandy in Haiti and
Manhattan, or sea-level rise in Bangladesh and the Netherlands. They suggest
that “for the foreseeable future—indeed, as long as there are human societies
84 C. McEwan

Box 5.1 Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Conception of the Human as a

Geophysical Force
Dipesh Chakrabarty has written some of the most thoughtful reflections on the
problems with species-thinking in debates about anthropogenic climate change
and the challenges this poses for humanist philosophies. He argues that the
Anthropocene is the moment when the human becomes fully manifest in Earth
history and, paradoxically, the moment in which we lose our ability to compre-
hend this effect (2012, 14). Its primary historical significance lies in the way its
proponents give finality to the blurring of Nature and the Human, even while
we know this binary to be an artefact of European imperial power. Chakrabarty
argues for,

the need to view the human simultaneously on contradictory registers: as a

geophysical force and as a political agent, as a bearer of rights and as author
of actions; subject to both the stochastic forces of nature (being itself one
such force collectively) and open to the contingency of individual human
experience. (Chakrabarty 2012, 15)

This marks a significant shift in postcolonial thinking about the human and has
the potential to connect in significant ways to the decolonial movements that
are challenging the Eurocentrism of the Anglo-American academy. It also has
some links with Paul Gilroy’s (2015) call for a reinvigorated left humanism that
draws inspiration from the anti-colonial writings of Césaire, James, Fanon,
Senghor and Du Bois. Gilroy argues that what he calls a ‘posthumanist human-
ism’ ought to engage with Black scholarship and its critique of racialism located
in anti-racist struggles. However, both Gilroy’s and Chakrabarty’s attachment to
humanism means that they cannot escape endorsing it as a necessary project,
with all the attendant risks of shoring up Eurocentric notions of a universal
humanity comprised of beneficent rescuers in wealthier countries and darker-­
skinned victims in poorer countries needing to be saved.
According to Chakrabarty, humanity is universal and climate change repre-
sents a planetary threat for all humanity: “Unlike in the crises of capitalism,
there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged (witness the drought
in Australia or recent fires in the wealthy neighbourhoods of California)” (2009,
221). More recently, Chakrabarty (2014, 14) has acknowledged that the crisis of
climate change will be routed through “anthropological differences”, but as
Malm and Hornborg (2014, 63) argue, this fails to account for the realities of dif-
ferentiated vulnerability on all scales of human society.

on Earth—there will be lifeboats for the rich and privileged”. Meanwhile, less
privileged and poorer people whose lives have been constrained by colonial-
ism and racism suffer the harshest consequences of the same ecological disas-
ters and are left to try to maintain livelihoods in already marginal areas.
Humanity may be universal, but it is important that postcolonial theory is
able to respond to the fact that climate change brings differentiated threats
that are being realized through historically inscribed inequalities (see Box 5.2).
 5 Decolonizing the Anthropocene 85

Box 5.2 Gayatri Spivak’s Notion of ‘Planetarity’

Gayatri Spivak has responded incisively to the challenges of re-scaling postcolo-
nial theory from the human to the planetary and, particularly, to critiques of
universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene and planetary change. She argues
that planetary ideas risk re-inscribing the universalism of globalism by problem-
atically assuming an “undivided ‘natural’ space rather than a differentiated
political space” (Spivak 2003, 72). She calls on us to “imagine ourselves as plan-
etary accidents rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global
entities” so that “alterity remains underived from us” (Spivak 2012, 339). Spivak’s
notion of planetarity is a strategy for learning planetary difference. It is a chal-
lenge to decolonize knowledge about the world by knowing it from outside of
the categories of Western thought (Krishnaswamy and Hawley 2008). It calls for
a move away from reading non-Western epistemologies, ontologies and subjec-
tivities from the vantage point of Western knowledge and through an oriental-
izing canon. It demands that difference is known in ways that do not prescribe
otherness in one’s own terms and thus “offers a topos for learning the worldings
that liberal multiculturalism and the cosmopolitan imagination may not be
equipped to recognize” (Jazeel 2011, 88). It creates the possibilities for a “multi-
plicity of critical, decolonizing perspectives against and beyond Eurocentered
modernity, from the various epistemic locations of the colonized people of the
world” (Grosfoguel 2012, 97). This is important because progressive ideas need
to emerge from critical thinkers in dialogue across cultural difference.
The invitation opened by Spivak’s notion of planetarity works against the
hope-less scenarios for future international relations painted by some scholars
about the Anthropocene. Pessimists paint a bleak picture in which Anthropocene
politics are reduced to management of the post-apocalyptic present: the gover-
nance of polluted oceans, flooded cities and burning and desertified landscapes
in which survival is all humanity can hope for. In contrast, planetarity and what
is seen as the collapse of the modernist universe create unique possibilities to
decolonize international relations, to reflect again on who counts as human, to
become attuned to the needs of non-humans, and to engage with and learn
from non-Western indigenous cosmologies. In turn, this has the potential to
reinvigorate debates about renegotiating and re-politicizing security, participa-
tion and well-being, and to establish new forms of political cooperation.
However, this is unlikely to happen while Anthropocene debates remain decid-
edly Eurocentric in focus and outlook.

Indigenous scholars and race theorists have raised serious concerns about
the Euro-Western academy’s current approach to human-environmental rela-
tionships (see Chap. 24), which they argue erases race, colonialism and slavery
and poses difficult challenges for theorizing the Anthropocene. Posthumanism
and the ontological turn have been challenged as Eurocentric because they
erase non-European ontologies and refer instead to a foundational ontological
split between nature and culture as if it is universal (Sundberg 2014). As Todd
(2015, 245–246) argues, scholars critical of this Eurocentrism re-centre the
locus of thought, offering a reconfiguration of understandings of
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human-­environmental relations towards praxis that acknowledges the critical

importance of land, bodies, movement, race, colonialism and sexuality. For
example, Sundberg (2014, 39) urges scholars to enact the ‘pluriverse’ (a world
in which many worlds fit) as a decolonial tool, in her case drawing on Zapatista
principles of “walking the world into being” (see also Kothari et al. 2019). For
Sundberg, walking and movement bring a decolonizing methodology to frui-
tion because, “As we humans move, work, play, and narrate with a multiplic-
ity of beings in place, we enact historically contingent and radically distinct
worlds/ontologies”. Planetary thinking, therefore, can help decolonize the
Anthropocene by acknowledging and embracing difference, in contrast to
global thinking, which assumes universal planetary sameness.

Decolonizing the Anthropocene

and Provincializing Eurocentric Futurism
Responding to the profound challenges posed by the Anthropocene requires
scholars everywhere to decolonize their imaginaries. Plural democratic imagi-
naries in which human and non-human actors are shaping new ideas about
responsible and progressive planetary futures are far removed from a founda-
tional narrative of economic-growth-equals-modernity-equals-progress. These
ideas create new ethical perspectives on nature, life and the planet that privi-
lege “subaltern knowledges of the natural” and articulate “in unique ways the
questions of diversity, difference and inter-culturality—with nature… occu-
pying a role as actor and agent” (Escobar 2007, 198).
The concern of postcolonial scholars to provincialize Europe (in its widest
sense as ‘the West’) remains pertinent considering the urgency to imagine and
enact responsible and progressive planetary futures, and the maintenance of
colonial relationships in global geopolitics and economics. Ironically, how-
ever, this concern may have become less urgent precisely because the energies
driving alternatives are no longer necessarily located in Euro-America. Western
countries appear to be provincializing themselves while African, Asian and
other developing countries are advancing economically, socially and politi-
cally. As Mbembe (2013) argues, the fixation in Europe and the USA with the
question of immigration is jeopardizing the creation of more dynamic rela-
tions with Africa and Asia. Both Europe and the USA are building fortresses
around themselves and the only other response to a receding American empire
is more militarism. As Europe and the USA are withdrawing, other countries
such as China, India, Turkey and (until recently) Brazil are increasingly
 5 Decolonizing the Anthropocene 87

playing a role in the unfolding geopolitical and economic reconfiguration.

They are also the places in which solutions are being sought to the irreconcil-
ability of economic growth and environmental sustainability. As Europe closes
its borders, countries in the global South may begin to open their borders and
play a more influential role in global affairs. In this context of declining
Western influence, the racist stereotypes that have been the concern of post-
colonial critics perhaps also become less relevant: as Mbembe wryly observes
“we should leave Europeans to deal with their own stupidities because we have
more urgent tasks and projects to attend to… Europe will have to deal with
its own mental illnesses, racism being the first of these” (ibid.). Despite the
pessimism concerning environmental crisis, global South scholars like
Mbembe are optimistic about the greater role that African, Asian and Latin
American countries will play in global affairs and in theorizing futures in the
Anthropocene.
Planetary futures are being played out in global South countries and the
economic, social, migratory and security impacts of vulnerability in these
places will have profound consequences for the rest of the world. However,
while a few scholars are engaging with non-Western, indigenous knowledges
to theorize the Anthropocene and ways of surviving (Todd 2015), mainstream
debates largely neglect the ideas emerging in these places. There is thus a need
to reflect on what it means to decolonize and inhabit the Anthropocene
through an engagement with non-Western creativity, thought and praxis con-
cerning ecological crisis, the precarity of human and non-human life, and
relationships between land, people and nature. There is a need to investigate
ways of responding to the deep ethical, social and political challenge of learn-
ing from those least responsible for and yet most affected by the Anthropocene,
whose knowledges have historically been marginalized and erased by hege-
monic relationships of power, and who have long resisted those systems creat-
ing the current crisis. There is also a need to explore how alternative humanist
critiques of the Anthropocene might be enacted while harnessing the poten-
tial for the idea of Anthropocene to challenge political imagination. Placing
the Anthropocene perhaps opens a way forward: for example, the notion of an
African Anthropocene offers a productive paradox that holds planetary tem-
porality and specific human lives in a single frame (Hecht 2018) (see Box 5.3).
Watson (2014, 93) argues that engaging with these new ways of thinking
emerging beyond the West—what he calls “subalternist cosmopolitics”—is
important for the creation of “cohabitable worlds and corollary forms of local
governance with actors that don’t share the cognitive, bodily, and metaphysi-
cal forms of human being” (see also Sarr 2019). He argues that the idea that
the current political system “constructed to represent human interests and
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constituencies” might be able to “know and care for the ontologically dispa-
rate worlds and experiences of other-than-human beings may amount to the
present era’s predominant ideological delusion” (ibid.). In other words, our
political systems cannot act ecologically because, as artefacts of previous eras
in which Western notions of modernity and progress were considered univer-
sal, they were not designed to do so. The more precarious present age thus
requires more heterogeneous and experimental forms of governance in which
one group of humans should not exercise sovereignty over other groups of
humans and humans as a whole “should not exercise sovereignty over the
entirety to the Earth as we know (and don’t know) it” (ibid.). Again, this
points to pluriversal thinking and to the idea of a co-inhabited cosmos as criti-
cal to producing more just and liveable worlds. Rather than dwelling on
doom-laden scenarios of the inevitability of catastrophe or apocalypse, pluri-
versal thinking generates the kind of optimism that both Western scholars,
like Haraway and Tsing, and First Nations, Aboriginal and indigenous schol-
ars are cultivating by exploring “alternative politics of more-than-human
entanglements” (Tsing 2015, 135). The hope is that this might create the
possibilities for new commons in the ruins of capitalism from which humans
and non-humans can survive.
Postcolonial approaches are important in this radical rethinking of life in
the Anthropocene because, in their focus on racial politics rooted in colonial
and neo-colonial socio-economic relations, they offer alternatives to the tech-
nocratic approaches to dealing with current challenges of addressing climate
change, sustainability, food security and so forth. These challenges cannot be
addressed without also acknowledging continuing dispossession, uneven eco-
nomic development and social inequality that emerged in the colonial past.
As Klein (2016, 11) argues, Edward Said

may not have had time for tree-huggers, but tree-huggers must urgently
make time for Said—and for a great many other anti-imperialist, postcolonial
thinkers—because without that knowledge, there is no way to understand how
we ended up in this dangerous place, or to grasp the transformations required
to get us out.

Arguments such as these are all the more pertinent considering recent
debates about the whiteness of climate justice movements such as
FridaysForFuture and Extinction Rebellion.
 5 Decolonizing the Anthropocene 89

Box 5.3 African Philosophies and the Anthropocene

People across the African continent have been living with and adapting to a high
degree of climate variability and associated risks for centuries, but recent decades
have seen accelerated rates of change and increased incidences of climatic disas-
ters. Accelerated climate change, population growth and natural resource deple-
tion pose significant threats to natural assets (land productivity, livestock, water
and energy resources), capabilities (health, nutrition, education) and human
development, which are exacerbated by ecological fragility and two-thirds of
sub-Saharan Africans needing to make a living from the environment. However,
this also creates fertile ground for new ways of thinking.
African philosophies such as Ubuntu provide one possibility from which to
theorize life in the Anthropocene in innovative ways, which could have pro-
found implications for thinking differently about humanism, posthumanism and
the rights of other species. Ubuntu is a relational understanding of the process
of becoming and being remade as a person through the ethical interaction with
what or who is not her: a person is a person through other people, or ‘I am
because of you’. In contrast to Cartesian logic of ‘I think therefore I am’, Ubuntu
encapsulates an essence of humanity based on belonging, participating, sharing
and affirming this humanity through recognition of an ‘other’ in his, her or its
uniqueness and difference. Whereas humanism is anthropocentric, Ubuntu as a
philosophy of humanness overcomes the anthropocentric-ecocentric divide to
view human life as embedded in and related to ecological life (Le Grange 2015):
humanity is affirmed through its relatedness to human and non-human others.
It also opens new ways of engaging with the non-human a site of intervention,
since as a category this also depends on the different notions and boundaries of
‘the human’ in the relational ontologies being investigated.
Mbembe (2013) argues that the African continent has three attributes, rooted
in African philosophies such as Ubuntu, which are creative and increasingly sig-
nificant in a contemporary world of rapid change and profound uncertainty. The
first is multiplicity—the profusion of cultures, knowledges, world-views and phi-
losophies that colonialism set out to erase (e.g. through the imposition of indi-
viduality and monotheistic Christianity), but which endure and are a resource for
remaking the continent. The second is circulation and mobility—the idea of the
African historical cultural experience being one in which almost everything was
on the move. In contrast to the Hegelian notion of Africa as a closed continent,
Mbembe argues, “it was always a continent that was on the move” (ibid.) and he
suggests that this concept of movement can be mobilized in creative ways to
deal with contemporary challenges. The third is composition—African lives are
compositional and relational, for example in the ways in which the economy is
lived on an everyday basis or in the ways in which people relate to one another,
with the subject understood as being made and remade through the ethical
interaction with what or who is not him or her. Mbembe’s point is that Africa can
make a creative contribution to the world of ideas and praxis that can be to the
benefit of the world at precisely the moment of Western withdrawal (see also
Sarr 2019). This, he argues, has implications for all manner of things in an age of
ecological crisis: “theories of exchange, theories of democracy, theories of
human rights, and the rights of other species” (ibid.). Moreover, he argues that
“the very future of our planet is being played out in Africa” (Mbembe 2015) in
the responses to the challenges posed by ecological crises, climate change, refu-
gees and so forth.
90 C. McEwan

Conclusion
The ethos that underpins much of postcolonialism, decolonialism and critical
posthumanism will remain relevant in responding to the current ecological
crisis and the challenges it poses. As Mbembe (2016) argues, this ethos is
concerned with reopening the future of the planet to all who inhabit it and
learning how to share it again—“amongst but also between its human and
non-human inhabitants, between the multiple species that populate our
planet”. Any possibility of surviving the current ecological crisis rests on a
growing awareness of our precariousness as a species in the face of ecological
threats and fostering a postcolonial, more-than-human ethos of sharing. The
planetary turn is still unfolding, but it signals a conceptual shift that realizes
one aim of postcolonialism in that Europe and the West will be thoroughly
provincialized. As Mbembe (2016) argues, “older senses of time and space
based on linear notions of development and progress are being replaced by
newer senses of time and of futures founded on more open narrative models”.
Universal Western thinking is no longer assumed by critics to provide solu-
tions to the present crisis. However, as Schmidt (2019, 729) argues, universal
policymaking and ideas of ‘neoliberalism without nature’—a neoliberalism
that “retains the structure of sustainable development” but dispenses with the
idea “that nature provides a stable backdrop for fulfilling human needs from
one generation to the next”—are already shaping new notions of belonging in
the Anthropocene. Critical scholarship has yet to gain purchase in these
realms. To have any relevance in understanding these shifts and their possible
outcomes, IR and the wider social sciences need to remain attuned to the fact
that China and other Asian, African and Latin American countries will
undoubtedly play significant and possibly quite divergent roles in shaping
these futures. Decolonizing the Anthropocene requires a deeper engagement
with the creativity, philosophies and praxis emerging in these parts of the
world, and especially in those ‘shadow spaces’ created historically by hege-
monic relationships of power and knowledge. As Schmidt (2017) argues, it is
in these spaces from which peripheral communities and learning practices
may contribute to enhancing resilience through the co-creation of new fram-
ings of human-Earth relationships and ideas about how to transition to them.
IR and the wider social sciences have a responsibility to widen the range of
theories and praxis concerning the future, and to develop a radical and trans-
formative project for scholarship on planetary well-being in response to the
unprecedented social and environmental challenges that characterize what has
come to be known as the Anthropocene.
 5 Decolonizing the Anthropocene 91

Key Points

1. The concept of the Anthropocene has been criticized as Eurocentric and

part of the naming practices of the West. Its roots in colonialism, and the
racialized inequalities and dispossession that are a feature of the
Anthropocene, are often overlooked.
2. The Anthropocene poses challenges for postcolonial theory in deciphering
the politics of otherness and contributing towards a progressive politics
capable of responding to the ecological crisis.
3. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s attempt to view the human simultaneously as a geo-
physical force and as a political agent marks a significant shift in postcolo-
nial thinking about the human, but fails to recognize differentiated
vulnerability on all scales of human society.
4. Gayatri Spivak’s notion of planetarity is an alternative to universalizing nar-
ratives of the Anthropocene and planetary change, and challenges us to
decolonize knowledge about the world by knowing it from outside of the
categories of Western thought.
5. Pluriversal thinking—based on the idea of a world in which many worlds
fit—can help decolonize the Anthropocene by acknowledging and embrac-
ing difference, and responding to the deep ethical, social and political chal-
lenge of learning from those least responsible for yet most affected by the
Anthropocene, whose knowledges have historically been marginalized and
erased by hegemonic relationships of power.

Key Questions

1. In what ways is the Anthropocene a Eurocentric concept?

2. What challenges does the idea of the Anthropocene present to postcolonial
theory and why?
3. In what ways have postcolonial scholars responded to these challenges?
4. Why is it important that IR learns from knowledges that have historically
been marginalized?

Acknowledgement Some of the ideas discussed here draw upon work published in
Chapter 8 of my book Postcolonialism, Decoloniality and Development (Routledge,
2019). I am grateful to Routledge for permission to reuse and rework this material in
this chapter.