This chapter shows how, from Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly to Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, American horror erupts out of the violence performed on indigenous people by white settler society, on people and land on the slavery plantation, and on citizens in the Global South and Middle East during period when the United States has extended and protected American global hegemony. By reading American colonialism and neo-imperialism as central to American extractivist capitalism, the chapter reveals how American horror also narrates the devastating violence done to the planet itself. The chapter observes that much American horror produced by and for white settler society represents settler violence against people and land as justified and regenerative, but it also discusses a number of less reactionary texts that make plain the horrific violence inherent in the capitalist colonial project.

Drawing upon the arguments made throughout the book, in this concluding chapter I argue that as well as negating humanism through a focus on the non-human, animal historians have an imperative to find subjects and actors who can be ‘necessary fictions’ for radical politics. The animal remains important in this but not as a destabilizing spectre haunting humanistic assumptions. The animal can be a radical subject through our recognition that it represents more than just the organism itself. The animal is a synecdoche for the environments that they emerge from and are reproduced within. To include animals in our histories is to value the ecologies that make possible their continued existence in the world. But lest this claim become an empty gesture towards a liberal, inclusive environmental politics, it is a radical position that needs to be attenuated by a critique of the commoditization of life and marginalization of human populations.

In recent years, Earth system scientists have acknowledged humanity’s Earth- and life-altering powers by calling our epoch the Anthropocene. This chapter explores the logic at work in this designation and argues that its roots go further back than the origins of industrialism and war capitalism in modernity (the Capitalocene). The essential and enduring issue is whether people can learn to live charitably within a world of limits. The origins of agriculture and the formation of city-states indicate what can be called a “thin Anthropocene” at work in the earliest civilizations evident around the globe. Examining this history, and the logic at work within it, enables us to see how people have thought about Earth and humanity’s place within it.

This chapter begins from the premise that the Anthropocene calls for an evaluation of human life from the perspective of posthumanism. In order to explore how this might be done, I take a closer look at the term the Anthropocene and two additional terms that have emerged from the social sciences and humanities as potential alternatives, the Capitalocene and Chthululene. Taking up threads from Donna Haraway’s concept of Chthululene, I draw on the diverse/community economies literature to explore an example of how we might think and live differently in-nature. The chapter concludes by briefly commenting on the politics of this scholarship and what is at stake in the term one adopts for this period.

The Anthropocene is the new designation for our current geological epoch in which human activity has decisively altered earth ecosystems and the fossil record in ways that will be measurable by the geologists of our uncertain future. This chapter investigates the relationship between feminist thinking and the Anthropocene, establishing the gendered dimensions of environmental crisis, and considering how feminist thinkers have approached a range of ‘environment’ topics, including feminised constructions of ‘Nature’; the masculinism of capitalism, technology, science, and environmentalism; and the colonial erasures of the ‘Anthropocene’. This critical work is part of a long-tradition of intersectional environmental activism, which intersects with wider gender-rights campaigns, including reproductive rights and health, autonomy and equality, representation and participation, struggles against class oppression and racism, and feminist and queer critiques of militarisation, extractionism, and colonialism. Ultimately, new feminist understandings of the Anthropocene investigate and further intersectional ecological activism and seek to improve the material conditions of women’s lives.