Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:01:37.192Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

History 4°: Postcolonial Method and Anthropocene Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2014

Ian Baucom
Ian Baucom*
Affiliation:
Duke University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The essay opens by situating Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent work on climate change and the anthropocene (the new geological period of time in which humans have become a planet-reshaping “force of nature”) together with a broader contemporary discourse on the human/nonhuman in relation to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean Paul Sartre’s 1960s debate on the nature of history and the dialectic. Although not explicitly advanced under the sign of that debate, these recent discourses, I suggest, share and extend some of its crucial features, taking something from both sides. From Sartre: the call for a search for critical method adequate to addressing Marx’s observation that we make our own history, but not under circumstances of our own choosing. From Lévi-Strauss: the argument that “history” is inadequately addressed by the “historian’s code,” that the situation of our time encompasses multiple scales and orders of time: most significantly, an array of “extra-historical,” “infra-historical,” and “supra-historical” registers of human/nonhuman time. From there, I return to Chakrabarty, to discuss the ways in which his work takes up those twin challenges. I pursue this reading by considering the relation between his earlier conceptualization (in Provincializing Europe) of History 1 and History 2 and the new theory of history emerging from his work on climate change, which I call History 3. I conclude by suggesting that despite its enormously rich considerations of the multiscaled temporality of the anthropocene, Chakrabarty’s recent work also sometimes bends the time of climate linear in the progress toward catastrophe, thereby bypassing the full possibility of a multitemporal ontology of the present that would include the persistence into the anthropocene of History 1 and 2. I suggest, therefore, that while drawing on his recent work, we need to continue in a search for a method adequate to the situation of our time; a time that knots together (minimally) Histories 1, 2, and 3; a time that I am provisionally calling History 4°.

Keywords

anthropocenehistorian’s codeclimate changemethodologypostcolonial theory
Type
Paradigms
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 1 , Issue 1: Special Issue: New Topographies of the Postcolonial , March 2014 , pp. 123 - 142
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Gillis, Justin, “Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears,” New York Times, May 10, 2013Google Scholar, accessed October 14, 2013, at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes-long-feared-milestone.html.

2 Gillis, “Heat-Trapping Gas.”

3 Jameson, Fredric, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002), 29Google Scholar.

4 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” in Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009), 199Google Scholar.

5 See Baucom, Ian, “The Human Shore: Postcolonial Studies in an Age of Natural Science,” in History of the Present, 2:1 (Spring, 2012), 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Marx, Karl, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. 1 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, USSR, 1969), 13–15Google Scholar.

7 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 258–259Google Scholar.

8 Lévi-Strauss, , The Savage Mind, 259Google Scholar.

9 Lévi-Strauss, , The Savage Mind, 259Google Scholar.

10 Lévi-Strauss, , The Savage Mind, 261Google Scholar.

11 Lévi-Strauss, , The Savage Mind, 260Google Scholar.

12 Lévi-Strauss, , The Savage Mind, 260Google Scholar.

13 Marx, Karl, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: Cambridge Texts in The History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Sartre, Jean Paul, Search for A Method, Hazel E. Barnes, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 45Google Scholar, 91.

15 Sartre, , Search for A Method, 48Google Scholar, 53. Sherman, David, Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity (New York: SUNY Press, 2008), 261Google Scholar.

16 Sherman, , Sartre and Adorno, 261Google Scholar.

17 Lévi-Strauss, , The Savage Mind, 260Google Scholar.

18 Lévi-Strauss, , The Savage Mind, 262Google Scholar.

19 Lévi-Strauss, , The Savage Mind, 262Google Scholar.

20 Lévi-Strauss, , The Savage Mind, 262Google Scholar.

21 Lévi-Strauss, , The Savage Mind, 248Google Scholar.

22 Lévi-Strauss, , The Savage Mind, 245–247Google Scholar.

23 See Chandler, James, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar, particularly the Introduction and Chapter One.

24 Malabou, Catherine, What Should We Do with Our Brain? trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, 5 and throughout. For additional influential recent work in the neuro-humanites see also: Malabou, Catherine, The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread (Boston: Polity Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Catherine Malabou and Adrian Johnston, eds, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Smail, Daniel Lord, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar: Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Zunshine, Lisa, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Zunshine, Lisa, ed. Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Connolly, William, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002)Google Scholar; and Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt Books: 2003).

25 See Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain.

26 See Latour, Bruno, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Catherine Porter, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar: Haraway, Donna, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Morton, Timothy, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Meillasoux, Quentin, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum Books, 2008)Google Scholar.

27 See Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh” (1977) interview. In Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings (ed. Colin Gordon), 1980: 194–228.

28 Latour, , Politics of Nature, 49Google Scholar and throughout; Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 1 and throughout; Lévi-Strauss, , Savage Mind, 246Google Scholar, 247.

29 Malabou, , What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 5Google Scholar.

30 Chakrabarty, , “The Climate of History,” 222Google Scholar.

31 Chakrabarty, , “The Climate of History,” 199Google Scholar.

32 “4˚—Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4˚C Warmer World Must Be Avoided,” A Report for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics, November 2012, http://climatechange.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/Turn_Down_the_heat_Why_a_4_degree_centrigrade_warmer_world_must_be_avoided.pdf), accessed October 14, 2013.

33 “Turn Down the Heat,” 1.

34 “Turn Down the Heat,” xv.

35 “Turn Down the Heat,” xv.

36 “Turn Down the Heat,” 15, 26, 62.

37 “Turn Down the Heat,” xv.

38 “Turn Down the Heat,” xvi, xv.

39 “Turn Down the Heat,” xvii.

40 “Turn Down the Heat,” xvii.

41 “Turn Down the Heat,” xv.

42 “Turn Down the Heat,” 60.

43 Zizek, Slavoj, Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2011)Google Scholar.

44 Agamben, Giorgio, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

45 McKibben, Bill, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books, 2010)Google Scholar.

46 See Morton, Tim, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

47 Chakrabarty, , “Climate of History,” 201Google Scholar.

48 See in particular Ato Quayson, “The Sighs of History: Postcolonial Debris and the Question of (Literary) History, in New Literary History, 43:2 (Spring 2012) and the other essays in this special edition responding to Chakrabarty’s “Climate of History” and Robert Young’s “Postcolonial Remains” (published in the previous edition of the journal, New Literary History, 43:1 [Winter 2012] 19–42).

49 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 6Google Scholar.

50 Chakrabarty, , Provincializing Europe, 70Google Scholar.

51 Chakrabarty, , Provincializing Europe, 7Google Scholar.

52 Chakrabarty, , Provincializing Europe, 14–15Google Scholar.

53 Chakrabarty, , Provincializing Europe, 16Google Scholar.

54 Chakrabarty, , Provincializing Europe, 66Google Scholar.

55 Chakrabarty, , “Climate of History,” 212Google Scholar.

56 Chakrabarty, , “Climate of History,” 216Google Scholar, 221.

57 Chakrabarty, , “Climate of History,” 220Google Scholar.

58 Chakrabarty, , “Climate of History,” 208Google Scholar.

59 Chakrabarty, , “Climate of History,” 218Google Scholar.

60 Chakrabarty, , “Climate of History,” 210Google Scholar.

61 Chakrabarty, , “Climate of History,” 210Google Scholar; Morton, , The Ecological Thought, 59–97Google Scholar; Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 142Google Scholar and ff.; Bennett, Jane, “Earthling, Now and Forever?” in Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, eds. (New York: Punctum Books, 2013), 245–246Google Scholar.

62 Bennett, , “Earthling,” 246Google Scholar.