Humanity is facing extinction. When will we realise we’re all in the same boat? Such sweeping statements continue to feature in mainstream approaches to what has been termed the Anthropocene. This indicates a persistent denial of the historical, social and geographical differentiations characterising both the effects of and responsibilities for climate change and ecological disasters. A growing body of scholarship critical of this denial has highlighted the role of colonialism and racism in issues now debated under the rubric of the Anthropocene, and the practice of extractivism that has been central to that role.
This workshop builds on relevant critical scholarship by approaching climate change and ecological disasters as grounded in and productive of extractivist colonialism and racism but also seeks to contribute to it by way of a specific methodological focus on aesthetics. It does so by considering aesthetics not as indexing a set of formal features or notions of taste, but rather as a medium through which sensibilities and insensibilities are produced through materiality and distributed across geography and the bodies inhabiting that geography.
Working from this materialist and relational understanding of aesthetics as both ethics and politics, we ask, what are the aesthetic practices that feature in mainstream approaches to the Anthropocene and critical responses to it? How have these practices approached the role of extractivist colonialism and racism in climate change and ecological disasters? What are the various aesthetic registers and modes in which they have approached this role and how might these approaches be reproducing or contesting the Anthropocene’s extractivist colonialism and racism? What materially grounded notions of “humanity” and its variously prefixed cognates shape and are shaped by such approaches?
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