This session seeks to encourage robust critical consideration of the anthropos in scholarly work concerned with the Anthropocene by attending to questions of race and gender, categories which have historically delimited the boundaries of the human. It seeks to foster new work by youngers scholars by placing their work in conversation with a more senior scholar. The session topic is a timely intervention that engages with an explosion of recent critical work on the Anthropocene that attends to such questions. The raising of such questions at this juncture represents the evolution of the field and points to exciting new directions. Not simply engaged with drawing attention to this crisis of planetary proportions, this new work brings the critical insights developed over decades in race and gender studies to bear on the relatively recent work on the Anthropocene. As a consequence, discourse that some have criticized as being merely descriptive as it attempts to conceptualize phenomena on a planetary scale.

For approaching a decade now, critical study on the Anthropocene has been advancing in literary and cultural studies, bringing new insight into the consequences of human activity on the earth’s geology and other ecosystems since the Industrial Systems. Importantly, the Caribbean scholar and activist, Sylvia Wynter has brought attention to the correspondence of the acceleration of these phenomena with the age of decolonization and the struggle of the majority of the world’s population to move beyond the wretched conditions to which colonialism had consigned them. Wynter’s intervention has been a stimulus to other critical work by a range of scholars from Donna Haraway, Richard Nixon, and others who have highlighted the necessity of thinking with and through the disproportionate impact on the planet’s most vulnerable, the very same populations historically excluded from the category of the human and who have benefited the least from our fossil-fueled era. The critical excitement that has greeted the publication of Katherine Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None testifies to the timeliness of this proposed panel.

The idea for this panel grew from audience reactions to one of the presentations at the Global South Forum’s panel, “Waste, Garbage, and Effluence in the Global South.” The lively conversation generated by a paper on nuclear waste in Pacific Literatures included a reminder that this region’s vulnerability in the age of global climate change was in a real sense a continuation of the horrors visited upon this region in the earlier nuclear age. This conversation alerted the executive members of the Global South to its unique position to foster a critical dialogue and intervention into a discourse that has been slow to take up questions of inequality and the long histories of racial and gender subjugation.

To promote discussion, we have selected papers that represent a diversity of critical texts and regions with the hope of fostering dialogue that intersects with scholar conversations taking place in African American, African, and critical prison studies. We will begin with “The Thomas Fire and the Carceral State” by Sage Gerson. She argues that representations of incarcerated firefighters in the cultural production surrounding the Thomas Fire – a documentary and graphic – demonstrate that the “Anthropocene is not one of species life, but instead one of uneven privilege and exploitation.” This work thoughtfully casts a critically gaze on post-racialist thinking in the Anthropocene turn and shows how it renders invisible the labor of incarcerated populations, furthering the exclusions associated with the category of the human.

Caroline Cheung historicizes Gerson’s concern with the prison industrial complex (PIC) in an analysis of James Grainger’s georgic and colonialist poem the Sugar-Cane (1764). Picking up on scholar’s invocation of prisons as the new plantation, Cheung reads Grainger’s poem as a meditation on the violence that structures the destructive relations of the plantation (and by extension the PIC) toward its victims, the environment, and its supporting institutions. This paper proposes a reading that locates the pre-history of the Anthropocene in the plantation economies of the New World.

This racial history of the Anthropocene informs the work of Jesmyn Ward, which is the subject of Henry Ivy’s “After the Flood.” Ivy locates in Ward’s fiction a “transscalar” mode of thinking that “comfortably moves between interrogations of police violence, …gendered labor distribution” to “the meteorology of hurricanes and arboriculture.” This work allows Ivy to address the intersectional occlusion that has been a feature of the Anthropocene’s scalar vastness at the planetary level. By centering the Anthropocene thinking in Ward’s novel, Ivy records voices often occluded from the dominant scholarly conversation.

An attention to genre and form distinguishes the closing contribution to our panel, Kirk Sides’s “The Eco-Fantastic,” which departs from the panel’s North American focus to consider the African Anthropocene in science fiction emanating from the continent. Following Donna Haraway’s insight about the resources made available in science fiction, which offers a way out of the limited habits of thinking associated with “the bounded, autonomous individualism characteristic of neoliberal, late modernity.” In his paper, Sides turns to Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon and Wanuri Kahiu’s short film Pumzi as examples of a kind of “sympoietic or ‘making-with-others’ mode of production” that encourages us to “think from the perspective of the African continent about what it means to tell stories of/in the Anthropocene.”

All these papers challenge us to rethink and expand our understanding of the Anthropocene and to account for the way it continues to re-inscribe the differences of race and gender that have historically limited the category of the human. We hope these papers will stimulate the audience to pose such questions and to see how their own work might intersect with this growing field and its urgent concerns. Ultimately, we hope these papers will demonstrate that scalar explanation need not be accompanied by the same erasures that have for too long taken a particular genre of the human as definitive of the entire species.