INTERSCALAR VEHICLES FOR AN AFRICAN ANTHROPOCENE On Waste, Temporality, and Violence

How can we incorporate humanist critiques of the Anthropocene while harnessing the notion’s potential for challenging political imagination? Placing the Anthropocene offers one way forward; the notion of an African Anthropocene offers a productive paradox that holds planetary temporality and specifi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCultural anthropology Vol. 33; no. 1; pp. 109 - 141
Main Author HECHT, GABRIELLE
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Washington Wiley 01.02.2018
American Anthropological Association
Subjects
Anthropocene
Anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Epistemology
Ethics
Imagination
Narratives
Original Articles
Political power
Politics
Stratigraphy
Time
Uranium
Violence
Gabon
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Summary:How can we incorporate humanist critiques of the Anthropocene while harnessing the notion’s potential for challenging political imagination? Placing the Anthropocene offers one way forward; the notion of an African Anthropocene offers a productive paradox that holds planetary temporality and specific human lives in a single frame. Navigating the Anthropocene from Africa requires attending to scale both as an analytic and an actor category. In order to do so, this essay proposes the notion of interscalar vehicles: objects and modes of analysis that permit scholars and their subjects to move simultaneously through deep time and human time, through geological space and political space. This essay discusses the creation and destruction of value/waste and pasts/futures around a uranium mine in Mounana, Gabon, to unpack the political, ethical, epistemological, and affective dimensions of interscalar vehicles and their violent Anthropocenic implications.
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ISSN:0886-7356
1548-1360
DOI:10.14506/ca33.1.05