Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene

Earl T. Harper, Doug Specht

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000453508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

Bringing together scholars from English literature, geography, politics, the arts, environmental humanities and sociology, Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene contributes to the emerging debate between bodies of thought first incepted by scholars such as Mouffe, Whyte, Kaplan, Hunt, Swyngedouw and Malm about how apocalyptic events, narratives and imaginaries interact with societal and individual agency historically and in the current political moment. Exploring their own empirical and philosophical contexts, the authors examine the forms of political acting found in apocalyptic imaginaries and reflect on what this means for contemporary society. By framing their arguments around either pre-apocalyptic, peri-apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic narratives and events, a timeline emerges throughout the volume which shows the different opportunities for political agency the anthropocenic subject can enact at the various stages of apocalyptic moments.

Featuring a number of creative interventions exclusively produced for the work from artists and fiction writers who engage with the themes of apocalypse, decline, catastrophe and disaster, this innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the politics of climate change, the environmental humanities, literary criticism and eco-criticism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction: … these unprecedented times
• 1 They say “our house is on fire” – on the climate emergency and (new) Earth politics
• 2 Do not go gentle into that good night: contested narratives and political subjectivities in the Anthropocene
• 3 The end of worlding: indigenous cosmologies in the Anthropocene
• 4 Apocalypse repeated: the absence of the indigenous subject in George Turner’s The Sea and Summer (1987)
• 5 Apocalyptic literary geographies: The Tempest’s ‘brave new world,’ Frankenstein’s ‘modern Prometheus’ and Cloud-Atlas’ ‘furthest-seein’ eye’
• 6 A world without bodies: geotrauma and the work of mourning in Jorie Graham’s Fast
• 7 Meaningful life at the end of times: ageism and the duty-to-die in Logan’s Run
• 8 The catastrophic drive
• 9 The self(ie) in the Anthropocene
• 10 Urbicide in the Anthropocene: imagining Miami futures
• 11 Triggering the apparitions: spectres of chemical seascapes
• 12 Study for “Memories of the apocalypse”
• 13 Variegated environmental apocalypses: post-politics, the contestatory, and an eco-precariat manifesto for a radical apocalyptics
• Index