universality & divergent temporalities in the anthropocene

posted april 21, 2025

Defining the “Anthropocene”

It is indisputable that we are living through an era quite different from that of our ancestors; one in which human technological development has much more significant implications for the world around us than ever before. It has thus been argued that this period must be characterized as something fundamentally distinct from the “Holocene”–the epoch previously used to describe the ongoing era¹. New scientific terminology has been developed in order to address this issue, and recent years have thus been dubbed the “Anthropocene”. The concept of the “Anthropocene” was first introduced to the world of academia in the early 2000s, popularized by a text co-authored by meteorologist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer titled The ‘Anthropocene’². Crutzen and Stoermer’s essay proposed that the dawn of the Anthropocene be recognized as the beginning of the late 18th century, as this marked the start of an era during which “the global effects of human activities [had] become clearly noticeable”³ and “an epoch in which humans [were] the dominant drivers of geologic change on the globe”⁴. A heated debate has emerged between professors in both the sciences and humanities alike regarding the language used to describe this time period (most notably the aforementioned “Anthropocene”), highlighting the interdisciplinary importance of the idea⁵.

Justifying Epistemological Critique

Though many scholars also contest the specific dates encasing this time period, this analysis will be conducted within the context of the original definition. Regardless, the scientific accuracy of the “Anthropocene” is not of particular relevance; this paper represents an interrogation of the proposed eras’ epistemological roots and hypothetical consequences of its use in practice. Dr. Liam Stanley, Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sheffield University, definitively states that critique is a prerequisite to policy action. He explains that the philosophical underpinnings of political perspectives are not expressed solely through interaction with philosophical literature, but also implicitly conveyed through methodological policy conclusions. In his words, “Epistemological decisions…generate ontological assumptions”⁶. Giuliana Mannu, a PhD professor in intercultural communication ethics at the University of Sassari, “The contribution of the philosophical and sociological disciplines is crucial in reflections on the politics of nature.” Mannu writes, contextualizing the aforementioned ethical framework to the intersection of sociopolitics and climate discussion. She also emphasizes the centrality of communal remembrance to ethical decision making, claiming that “no moral act could be possible without the role of the social community within the natural environment,”⁷.

Within the field of critical theory–the focus of this paper– scholars have identified many problematic assumptions embedded in the narrative constructed by a distinctive “Anthropocene” era. Chief among these is its tendency to universalize responsibility for the current climate crisis⁸ and erase the dynamic interactions between non-Western populations and their surrounding environments prior to the Industrial Revolution⁹. The Anthropocene is much more than a metric of geological time, but a settler colonialist political project designed to obscure historical colonial violence and legitimize settler futures¹⁰.

Temporal Rupture

In establishing an entirely new epoch to explain modern climate conditions, the Anthropocene narrative positions issues of social justice rooted in historical processes like colonialism and slavery as problems of the past. The assertion that we have entered a “new” era necessarily separates modernity from the conditions that enabled its creation, positioning those processes within the context of the “old” times. Elisa Randazzo and Hannah Richter, lecturers in politics at the University College London and University of Sussex respectively, develop a working definition to describe this phenomenon’s existence within Anthropocene scholarship. They refer to it as the “discontinuous-descriptive” approach, which describes an Anthropocene history “in terms of the progressive development of the human species” and a narrative that “cuts off acknowledgement of the ‘Anthropocene past’ as a…history of political struggles”¹¹. This model of temporality is thus “discontinuous” in that it ruptures traditionally teleological understandings of history that recognizes causal connections between events, and instead establishes modernity as an unprecedented phenomenon. This causes sociopolitical issues with roots in historical processes to “lose importance in the face of the fast and drastic changes of the anthropocentric Earth”¹².

Furthermore, this incomplete understanding of temporality has created an Anthropocene discourse that “claim[s] the novelty of crisis” rather than one that is “attentive to the historical continuity of dispossession and disaster caused by the empire”¹³. In his article “Energy Geographies in/of the Anthropocene: Where Now?”, Ankit Kumar, a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Sheffield University, further elaborates on this claim. “The risk posed by the urgency discourse is elevated because…framing of an ‘abstract universal Anthropos’...centring the ‘universal’ risks de-historicising responsibilities for climate change”, Kumar writes¹⁴. Not only does this quote illustrate the function of the Anthropocene narrative in obscuring the historical processes which directly facilitated modernity, but also introduces how it fabricates the illusion of blanket responsibility.

Anthropocentric Universality

Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago, is perhaps the most prominent advocate in favor of a universalist Anthropocene. For this reason, Chakrabarty’s writing–and other authors’ critiques thereof–serve to represent a microcosm of the broader debate among sociologists regarding the Anthropocene’s characteristic universality. The collective works of Dipesh Chakrabarty aim to reframe aspects of the Anthropocene that he deems anthropocentric, developing them instead into a new form of “planetary ethics”¹⁵. This is articulated most clearly in his book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, where he explicitly argues, “The globe is a humanocentric construction; the planet, or the Earth system, decenters the human… [and] we are part of [the planet], acting as a geological force,”¹⁶. He also argues that “scientists’ discovery of the fact that human beings have . . . become a geological agent points to a shared catastrophe that we have all fallen into”¹⁷. Both of these quotes explicitly utilize grammar that understands the status quo as a result of species-wide efforts. Kathryn Yusoff, a Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London, directly criticizes Chakrabarty’s “humanocentric” worldview. “As the Anthropocene proclaims the language of species life—anthropos—through a universalist geologic commons,” Yusoff writes, “It neatly erases histories of racism that were incubated through the regulatory structure of geologic relations”¹⁸. That is, by telling a universal story of a “shared humanity”, the Anthropocene neglects to acknowledge the way in which racism and colonialism have historically influenced the way in which humans relate to the Earth, and the role that context plays in determining the distribution of responsibility. The notion of the Anthropocene as a period of climate crisis spurred by a sudden influx of “human” influence on the environment assumes that mankind as a whole is equally responsible for the processes contributing to it, regardless of whether or not this is reality. Andrew Baldwin, a professor of geography at Durham University, examines the intersections of race, nature, and colonialism in his article Introduction: Whiteness, coloniality, and the Anthropocene. Baldwin explains that the Anthropocene is not inherently virtuous, but rather it is only “when scrubbed clean of its particularity does the Anthropocene acquire its unmarked universality”¹⁹. In short–it is only because the Anthropocene is detached from the colonial context it was born out of that it can be presented as a neutral, universally applicable narrative.

Colonial Amnesia

The imperialist state envisions itself leaving the Holocene era behind and entering the Anthropocene, framing its routine practice of settlerist amnesia as recognition of mankind’s technological advancement. However, a fundamental flaw exists within this narrative: it is predicated on the assumption that the past is frozen in time. More specifically, it mistakenly assumes that historic sociopolitical structures and their related cultural elements can be abandoned and left for dead. Because most of the Western countries responsible for promoting industrialization and extreme capitalist ideology are not actively establishing settler colonies and engaging in the process of colonization, they believe the colonialism characteristic of their earlier years to be buried deep beneath the soil of the modern-day. This white, Western interpretation of temporal evolution labels racial violence a thing of the past and completely forecloses any potential for future improvement. It represents a radical acceptance of the status quo and a future with shallow roots that reach no deeper than the modern day. It ascribes biological traits to metaphysical entities: in its desperation, America has manufactured a wistfully biopolitical fantasy.

Articulating an Alternative

The continuous/discontinuous distinction represents a complex phenomenon, but the terms themselves are very simple: the aforementioned dichotomy simply distinguishes between narratives that pose a continuous, perpetually existing timeline, and those that recognize a discontinuous split between “before” and “after” the Anthropocene era “began”. When developing an alternative to the discontinuous Anthropocene, a continuous-ontological understanding seems an intuitive option. This label describes the theoretical acceptance of an essentially unknowable Anthropocene in the name of recognizing the racialized context it exists within: an embracement of a form of geopower that exists external to the bounds of human comprehension²⁰. However, a continuous approach is unappealing in that it unintentionally perpetuates an excessively extreme form of post-colonialism, where native ways of knowing are portrayed as ambiguous to those outside of the community²¹. In doing so, it reinforces a depoliticizing colonialist mechanism that endorses the perceived “externality” of Indigenous peoples’ in order to obscure the academy’s “ability to fully comprehend and analyse [Indigenous] communities”²². The effects of this are intuitively harmful; if neo-colonialism cannot be recognized and thoroughly examined, then it also cannot be confronted. Thus, when constructing a preferable historical consciousness to that of the Anthropocene, it seems ideal to locate it somewhere around the half-way point between a “continuous” and “discontinuous” perspective. This calls for a worldview that “embraces ontological relationality and non-human agency” while remaining fluid enough to “become comfortable with clashing political demands and be genuinely open to alterity”²³.

While these requirements sound almost paradoxical, Zoe Todd–a Métis anthropologist and scholar of Indigenous studies–has theorized a decolonial counter-discourse that adheres to guidelines determined above. In their article Indigenizing the Anthropocene²⁴, Todd recommends the employment of a competing philosophical framework (to the Anthropocene) composed of two ideas presented by Dwayne Donald, a Papaschase Cree scholar. Todd combines Donald’s concept of “ethical relationality” (what Todd articulates as an “approach to our position as humans…rooted in balance and reciprocity”) and a research sensibility termed “Indigenous Métissage”, meaning the “ethical imperative to recognize…how our histories and experiences are layered and position us in relation to each other”²⁵.

However, this framework is still inadequate in isolation; it fails to account for the unique challenges experienced by those within Black bodies. The structural and deeply pervasive nature of anti-Blackness requires an ontology specifically designed to combat it, or a “post-apocalyptic world without any signs of ethical transformation”²⁶ will inevitably emerge regardless of our efforts against it. Todd and Donald's aforementioned relationality is not yet applicable to the Black reality as it assumes that human relationships are relatively tangible, a condition that does not ring true in the context of Black being. Axelle Karera, a professor in the Philosophy department at Emory University, argues that Whiteness (as a broader system of power) is incapable of distinguishing between “blackened” life and death. As long as Blackness is rendered “unregistrable”, it will remain “un-grievable”²⁷. This necessitates the integration of the revolutionary methodology described within Vivaine Saleh-Hanna’s Black Feminist Hauntology. Saleh-Hanna, the Director of Black Studies and professor of Crime & Justice studies at UMass Dartmouth, advocates the abolition of White-ologies by deconstructing continued legacies of Whiteness²⁸. She describes this structural shape-shifting as an approach facilitated by intergenerational, ancestral relationality that transcends Western conceptions of temporality. Only by acknowledging the ancient roots of modern violence can we resist the “enforced forgetfulness”²⁹ necessary to maintain white supremacy and above all else: the settler state. Emerita Professor of History at the University of Auckland, Judith Binney, directly addresses the manipulation and mutilation of historical truth by the colonial machinery of empire³⁰. “The ‘telling of history’, whether it be oral or written, is not and never has been neutral. It is always the reflection of the priorities of the narrators and their perceptions of their world.” Binney explains in Maori Oral Narratives, Pakeha Written Texts: Two Forms of Telling History³¹. She also makes a more explicit claim regarding the underlying motivations of said institutional involvement, specifically regarding the alteration of indigenous peoples lived experiences. “Western-trained historians…have been perpetuating colonialist attitudes in their so-called objective histories….these histories have served, to a considerable extent, to erase Maori memories and perceptions.” Binney’s analysis verifies that imperial knowledge systems' compulsion to intentionally forget³² is a thinly veiled settler move to innocence³³, greased by the anesthetizing yet innocuous nature of the Anthropocene narrative.

Relationality & Reciprocal Obligation

Thus, it becomes obvious that an approach involving a method of relationality grounded in the philosophy of Indigenous Métissage (but implemented throughout the cross-generational context established by Saleh-Hanna) would be most effective at destabilizing the settler state. The intersection of these ideologies reveals itself to lie within many non-Western cosmologies, such as the belief systems of the indigenous Polynesian peoples³⁴ or various Afro-diasporic communities³⁵. These groups partake in undeniably distinct spiritual practices, but are similar in their understandings of the relationship between the past and present. Time is perceived non-linearly, and the present is seen to be a “cyclic renewal of the past”³⁶. This perspective aligns with the Black feminist call for “asymmetrical reciprocity”³⁷, “rememory”, and direct engagement with one's “inherited past”³⁸. When a paradigm of Indigenous Métissage is framed through an understanding of hauntological obligation to both the future and the past, it fosters potential for transformative justice to take place. The combination of these research praxes establishes a relational ethic that can inform and supplement future discourse, rather than an alternative chronology designed to replace the Anthropocene. This enables the development of a historical consciousness that acknowledges the implications of our distinctive relationships to others (in the past, present, and future) and leaves room for the incorporation of Indigenous scholarship—without collapsing down to a totalizing, oversimplified narrative.