Black Anthropocene Working Group
The Black Anthropocene Working Group
This working group is interested in the meaning of Blackness in the Anthropocene and the ontological politics that might emerge from a Black Anthropocene. The ontological turn in Critical Black Studies appears to be increasingly vital for thinking through what might be at stake in a world after ‘Man’, after the ‘Human’ or after the ‘End of the World’. We are interested in exploring questions of Blackness posed in the register of ‘ontology’ or ‘para-ontology’ within and beyond the field of Critical Black Studies. In particular, we wish to explore ontological questions of Blackness as a way to move beyond the opposition between modern, rational, ontologies and non-modern, relational, decolonial ontologies, which structures much of the debate around the Anthropocene. If, as Critical Black Studies’ theorists suggest, the modern subject/world is grounded upon anti-Blackness, then how does the end of this world allow Blackness to be (re)thought as a condition of (im)possibility for alternative futures? How do we heuristically grasp different approaches to Black ontologies as productive/ speculative/ creative and/or as a negation of or limit to speculative imaginaries? What is at stake in the Black Anthropocene?
We are interested in assembling a working collective to explore and to refine these questions and would seek to organise textual readings, workshops or seminars and the potential discussion, sharing, or publication of group work. The group has been meeting since November 2020 and is open to all. We envisage online meetings on Zoom as the main working mode for the foreseeable future.
Next meeting
Thursday 23 May 2024, Joseph Winters, Hope Draped in Black (2016)
Forthcoming meetings
Thursday 13 June 2024, Ida Danewid, Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal (2023)
Thursday 5 September 2024, Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997/ 2022)
Thursday 24 October 2024, Rizvana Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (2023)
Thursday 5 December 2024, Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “Beyond This Narrow Now”: Or, Delimitations, of W. E. B. Du Bois (2022)
Meetings take place online. If you would like to join the working group please email me.
History of the group
Meetings so far have discussed: 1. Fred Moten, The Universal Machine: Consent not to be a Single Being (2018); 2. Nahum Dimitri Chandler, X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (2014); 3. R. A. Judy, Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black (2020); 4. David Marriott, Whither Fanon: Studies in the Blackness of Being (2018); 5. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (2020); 6. Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (2021); 7. Jayne Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021); 8. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete (2021); 9. Joshua Bennett, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (2020); 10. Zahi Zalloua, Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021); 11. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2002); 12. Laura Harris, Experiments in Exile: C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness (2018); 13. Rasheedah Philips (ed.), Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice, Vol. 1 (2015); 14. Jovan Scott Lewis, Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020); 15. Katherine McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’ (2013); 16. La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind – Madness and Black Radical Creativity (2020); 17. Malcom Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2022); 18. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (2022); 19. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2021); 20. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015); 21. Ramon Amaro, The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being (2022); 22. Ashante Reese, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in the Nation’s Capital (2020); 23. Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes (2023); 24. Tina Post, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (2023); 25. William Hart, The Blackness of Black: Key Concepts in Critical Discourse (2022); 26. Claire Colebrook, Who Would You Kill to Save the World (2023); 27. Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (2015); 28. Rei Terada, Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity (2023);