Apocalyptic Encounters

Apocalyptic Encounters

This group was formed with two aspirations. The first was to focus on the relationship between colonialism and the apocalypse (examining how central a language of apocalypticism was and is to particular instances of the colonial encounter in history and how the colonial encounter can be framed in apocalyptic terms). The second was to examine Indigenous, First Nations, and Fourth World cultures and contexts that have their own apocalyptic traditions, might adapt and rework or repurpose colonial apocalyptic beliefs, or might produce syncretic hybrids of those. Thinking in terms of ‘Decolonising or provincialising the Apocalypse’ can be useful; however, in order for this to attempt to be authentic, merely ‘additive’ or dilettante gestures have to be avoided, particularly from the perspective of a majority White cosmopolitan elite.

Participating Members:

Pamela Karimi

Prabhat Kumar

Rolf Scheuermann

Susan Watkins

David Wilson

1. Global and Planetary Insights into the Apocalypse

In Chapter 5 of the The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Dipesh Chakrabarty makes use of the suicide note of Dalit activist Rohith Vemula to argue for the possibility of connections between the creaturely/material and conceptions of the political in the Anthropocene. The chapter examines the historical context of stigma and upper-caste disdain associated with "the Dalit body," shedding light on the inherent limitations within prevailing political notions of the human body. Vemula asks to be considered ‘as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of stardust. In [e]very field, in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living’ (2021, 114). What does the choice of the symbol of stardust mean? How closely aligned to the material/embodiment is it? The chapter tries to connect the materiality of the non-human and the flow between human and non-human to ideas about human justice in order to create a politics that can function in an apocalyptic moment of climate crisis. Are there risks in abandoning ideas about the individual human as the bearer of rights? Chakrabarty’s analysis of how the Dalit body has been and still is identified with the material, imbricated in shit and death, perhaps repeats some of the othering strategies that he is attempting to dissect. Chakrabarty’s work has followed an interesting trajectory from being a member of the Subaltern Studies group to Provincialising Europe (2000), to the first ‘Climate of History: Four Theses’ essay (2009). The centrality (still) of Western educational models and systems in non-western contexts might mean that the turn he has taken in this book could be dismissed (in India, for example) compared to his earlier work, which was more grounded in the discipline of history and an understanding of (human) power structures and contexts. Would more local studies be helpful in demonstrating the kinds of politics he wants to create and focusing more closely on a non-human-centric approach? Can Tibetan Buddhism, for example, offer any spiritual models that make the sorts of connections he wants to make and how might those translate into a politics, or are they untranslatable? Chakrabarty includes a memory from his own life experience (which could even be termed a short piece of life writing) in this chapter, which recounts how, despite his parents inculcating in him ideas about human equality and dignity, and his mother telling him about the ‘injustice of untouchability,’ she still avoided the Bihari Dalit who cleaned the toilets in the family home, so that nothing in the home was touched by him or his toilet-cleaning brush. The statement: ‘How do we bring both versions of the human—in Vemula’s terms, “every human being treated as a mind” and the same person as “star dust”—together to constitute a new kind of political thought?’ (2021, 130) might be useful for our group as we continue on our exploration of, what we are calling, the Apocalyptic Encounter. Along the same line of thought and with regard to the main message of the book as a whole, we acknowledge Chakrabarty’s point, in the book from which this essay came, that reflecting on our current era or the apocalypse necessitates looking at them from two distinct viewpoints simultaneously: the global perspective, which is inherently human-centered, and the planetary perspective, which shifts the focus away from human centrality.

2. “Subterranean” Perspectives on a Shrinking World

In our second group meeting we read The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives by Macarena Gómez-Barris, who is an interdisciplinary scholar with focus on media studies and environmental issues. "The Extractive Zone," explores regions shaped by extractive capitalism and emphasizes submerged perspectives and alternative realities beyond colonial boundaries. It explores five specific spatial geographies in South America, highlighting their roles in the global economy and decolonization efforts. The book uses film, vernacular performances, and social and Feminist movements to challenge extractive capitalism and connects various elements, both human and non-human, within social ecologies.

The text introduces a perceptual approach, rooted in South American experience, to shift the gaze away from the generic planetary scale (such as looking at the environment from a submerged or subterranean perspective in film and video art examples in the book). It adopts a decolonial, queer, and femme episteme (i.e., a form of feminism or feminist knowledge that rejects the concept of a strict gender binary and acknowledges that individuals can exist anywhere along the gender spectrum, allowing for the possibility of being gender-neutral, gender-fluid) and methodology, embracing nonnormative modes of engaging with the social world. The book emphasizes submerged perspectives and challenges normative methodologies, offering new analytical frameworks.

Furthermore, it critiques Eurocentric visual theories and discusses how colonial and state violence historically asserted territorial control. But the text is not limited to past colonial histories and encounters between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples. It also explores digital colonialism and its role in controlling resource-rich territories and emphasizes the interconnected nature of surveillance, data mining, and resource mapping.

Ultimately, the book aims to decolonize the Anthropocene by documenting alternative forms of life within Indigenous territories and African-descendant ontologies. It focuses on liberation from various forms of power within interconnected social ecologies and highlights the importance of grounding decolonization in feminist-of-color queer thought and praxis.

While the book provides valuable insights and challenges prevailing narratives, some critics may contend that it presents a somewhat sanitized and politically pat perspective, lacking the acknowledgment of challenges that might accrue within marginalized voices and communities. Real-world applications of alternative viewpoints can involve complexities and tensions, and the book's depiction of communities and environmental awareness occasionally appeared to oversimplify intricate realities. Additionally, the book's focus on extractive capitalism as a monolithic force may be questioned, as there are competing perspectives and tensions within the capital. The romanticized idea of community is mentioned in the book and particularly in Chapter 2 and under the guise of “spiritual tourism.” The author could have delved deeper into this important topic. In our group discussions, we explored the intricacies of applying theoretical frameworks to real-world practices. This critique prompts a broader conversation about how well-intentioned academic theories can unintentionally impose external perspectives on local struggles and oversimplify complex issues. Moreover, a central analytic object in the book, the extraction zone, was problematized by the group as an imprecise concept whose strength as a bold, totalizing notion needs to be tempered by the recognition of a non-specific referent.

Nevertheless, we still found the book to be an excellent choice as it encouraged us to engage in critical reflection on the challenges of decolonization and the limitations of universal theory application. The book prompted us to reconsider our approach to presenting arguments in our own work concerning apocalyptic scenarios. Given the extensive mineral extraction occurring in fertile regions by powerful entities and corporations, it challenged us to explore how the humanities can offer fresh perspectives to sound the alarm. We questioned how Indigenous experiences and viewpoints could reshape our understanding of regions rich in natural resources, currently subject to excavations and exploitations by powerful actors. The book emphasized the importance of reevaluating our modes of thinking about these urgent, apocalyptic environmental challenges. While practical considerations like institutional reforms and policy changes are vital, the book made us also reflect on how we conceptualize these areas. Although the book didn't directly engage in policy-making or propose solutions, it provided a valuable framework for critical thinking and rethinking.

3. Colonized Ecosystems: Exploitation and the Apocalypse

Kathryn Yussof’s A Billion Back Anthropocenes, Or None is an extremely provocative and politically charged book that examines the academic/scholarly debates which have unfolded in the last two decades or so around the Anthropocene: that species of humans are geological agents of change, causing planetary transformation. 

Yusoff disputes the idea of the Anthropocene, the consequent planetary crisis, threatening the end of the world. She exposes the universalist language of Anthropocene, which subsumes the entire human species as an agent (and the future victim) of planetary transformation, as nothing but a cover for the extractive and violent history of White settler colonialism and slavery, in which (White male) geologists were active participants. She successfully shows that what we call the beginning of the Anthropocene is, in fact, the beginning of extractive capitalism by the European settler colonialists, which altered and set the process of the planetary transformation in motion. The story of White European men, who dispossessed, displaced, exploited and massacred BIPOC and, in turn, planetary life and resources, is cleverly put behind the curtain when Anthropocene is debated and understood in liberal universalist language.  

Building on existing academic histories of settler colonialism, slavery, forced migration, and exploitation of mineral-natural resources, she proposes to show the coevalness and complicity of geological sciences and scientists in assisting the extractive settler colonialism. She claims to show how the geological production of knowledge about earth/minerals – the semantics, tools, classification, and modes of property attribution, and the language of identification and extraction of matter (mineral)– by said geologists had uncanny similarity with the political-cultural economy of slavery. She insinuates that the language of geology has always had a transactional and constitutive relationship with slavery, which translated and transformed BIPOC bodies as matter like minerals/gold/silver.  

Her general claim about the erasure of the extractive history (White settler colonialism) in the discourse of Anthropocene is well taken. The author, however, does not illustrate and support her arguments through empirical examples of how the language of geology (of assigning properties, colouring, etc. to matter/mineral), overlaps and co-constitutes slavery (the BIPOC body as matter). Examples that she offers only remotely supports her arguments (for example, when she refers to the views of the geologist Sir Charles Lyell on race/Black emancipation rendered in the language of geological time.)  

As a result, much of her statements, which are powerful and persuasive otherwise, threaten to be reduced to (political) assertions. Further, it leaves the impression that she conflates the simultaneity of the discipline of mineralogy/geology and settler colonialism as equally complicit with geological science in the violence of slavery and capitalist extraction. 

One may wonder if the modern knowledge of the earth sciences is absolutely White, with no collaboration and contribution of BIPOC populations. As if geological knowledge in history has been eternally and absolutely White. Unlike other sciences, the historical particularity of geology also needed to be brought out clearly in the book. It is one thing to say that BIPOC knowledge was never acknowledged, denied value, and legitimacy, and/or was reconfigured and reprocessed in the making of modern science; it is quite another thing to understand the historical formation of a modern knowledge system as purely and exclusively White-European.  

The book, methodologically speaking, falls short of its aim when it sets out its agenda for transformative/ ‘insurgent’ geology. It uses literature/literary archives to set an agenda for alternative geology. But it is neither faithful to the methods of literary studies (it evades references to existing works on the same themes), nor does it seek to communicate measurably with the discipline of the geological sciences.

4. Blueprints for Alternative Forms of Living On the Brink of the Apocalypse

Donna Haraway is perhaps still best known for her ground-breaking work ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’ (first published in 1985), which famously argued that we should not be ‘afraid of our joint kinship with animals and machines’.  While the critical response to this essay focused much more on affinities between humans and machines, more recently, Haraway has concerned herself with companionship and symbiosis between humans and animals, moving towards the idea of humans and animals as ‘kin.’

In her 2016 Staying with the Trouble she discusses the problems with the apocalyptic mode:

These times called the Anthropocene are times of multispecies, including human, urgency: of great mass death and extinction; of onrushing disasters, whose unpredictable specificities are foolishly taken as unknowability itself; of refusing to know and to cultivate the capacity of response-ability; of refusing to be present in and to onrushing catastrophe in time; of unprecedented looking away. Surely, to say “unprecedented” in view of the realities of the last centuries is to say something almost unimaginable. How can we think in terms of urgencies without the self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myths of apocalypse, when every fiber of our being is interlaced, even complicit, in the webs of processes that must somehow be engaged and repatterned? (2016, 35)

Haraway sees our attraction to the Apocalyptic narrative as indulgent: it is a way to absolve ourselves from responsibility to persist in working to change the troubled world we live in. That work cannot take place without a preconception of our relationship with other species, the planet, and the environment.

For Haraway, the term Anthropocene (as a characterisation of our present moment and relationship with the Earth) is problematic because it slips inevitably into the tragic, apocalyptic mode, one in which we are powerless to make change. She identifies the term ‘Chthulucene’ as an alternative:

[T]he Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen – yet. We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react. The order is re-knitted: human beings are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story (2016, 55).

The Chthulucene is about ‘ongoingness […] past, present and to come’ (101), a ‘thick, fibrous, and lumpy “now,” which is ancient and not’ (206).  It resists the idea of an apocalyptic rupture in time, asking us to cross that imagined gulf between pre-apocalyptic, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic moments. For Haraway it is the tentacle that reaches out across this rupture to recognise and develop from the precarious times of our present moment into the future.

The metaphor of the Chthulucene draws from the biological process of symbiosis. Haraway refuses the distinction between ‘host’ and ‘parasite’ species to insist that all living beings are formed in interaction or co-constitution with each other. Indeed, a key goal of the book is to forge a new pathway for people and collectivities to enact effective political resistance, focusing on who we should be and what we should do in the presence of apocalyptic threats to humanity. This new resistance involves a dual imploring: to ‘stay with the trouble’ and to latch onto the problem/s that face us. With a new epistemology of causation, she encourages us to cease thinking hierarchically, stop thinking of humans as the center of our world and begin learning lessons from other species.

Her creation of a new vocabulary and language is a valuable step in this endeavor. Haraway wants political resistors to speak their truths through terminology that captures the nuances of their ideas (avoiding the awkwardness of resistors having to speak their truths through borrowed language that often hamstrings their attempts at communication). A new vocabulary, moreover, can avoid the fractures of identity politics by giving us a language of commensurability that envisages new kinds of intimacies and relations. However, her imagery of symbiotic connection between living beings could have acknowledged similar ideas and images (arising from premodern and global South sources) of hybrid creatures, sources that also include the interdependence of human, animal and plant life.  Instead, the choice of the term ‘Chthulucene’ is suggestive of H. P. Lovecraft’s short story ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1928) where the eponymous monster has a ‘vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind’. For Lovecraft, Cthulhu is the epitome of the horrific, non-human other, something humans are terrified of, rather than in symbiosis with. Therefore, it seems odd that Haraway should choose this term (in response to reviewers’ uneasiness with this intertext she has pointed to her different spelling and denied any connection). However, culture also works in a tentacular way, and such links are going to be made with or without her intention.

The actual practices she attends to in the book as examples of ‘sympoietic or tentacular thinking,’ such as the Madagascar Ako project, the crochet coral reef project, the New Age computer game, Never Alone and the Navajo weaving of Black Mesa, are often presented as utopian, uncomplicated and perhaps romanticized; arguably tidying away some of the problematic lived experiences of struggle and the economic and power realities of local cultures existing in difficult circumstances. Such utopian practices were also a feature of various countercultural movements in the 1960s and 1970s, movements which did not always prove successful in their attempts to live differently. For example, the original quiet, sustainable, and private nature of the hippie commune, Drop City, a pioneering enclave of countercultural artists near Trinidad in southern Colorado, changed when it started getting media attention, which brought a lot of tourists. Since the commune had a policy of letting everyone in, it couldn't keep these new visitors out, which eventually caused it to lose what made it special. By 1969, the environmentally friendly hippies who had started Drop City had all left, and the place turned into the kind of joke that its harshest critics had always called it.

However, failure is something that can be learnt from. A thick analysis of such failed attempts at ‘sympoiesis’ (‘making with’ in Haraway’s terms) might be even more useful than her case studies here, because strategies for keeping going in the face of failure are actually a better example of ‘staying with the trouble’ than some of the Utopian narratives contained in the book. Even if we admit the utility of Utopian thought for helping us to ‘think otherwise,’ or act as ‘the catalyst of a process, in which the reader is an active agent, of disrupting the normative conceptual frameworks of mundane experience’ (Levitas, 2013, 113), then what are the forms of political and artistic action and practice that allow us to keep going, make effective political interventions and jump scales from the local to the global? Here it should be noted that apocalyptic thinking, in the hands of those without power, can actually be an effective tool for seeking justice, rather than a deadening nihilism, as Haraway designates it. This points us to the relativity of the term apocalypse, and the need to frame and contextualize it, one of the primary intentions of this group.

As she has always done, Haraway argues for the centrality of ‘speculative fabulation’ (31) to the Chthulucene. Staying with the Trouble ends with the Camille stories, which are about the future of human beings and their symbiosis with other species over five generations. Haraway imagines a severe reduction in the numbers of the human population over each generation. With the slogan ‘make kin not babies’, she prioritizes new forms of human kinship than the biological, and she shows humanity moving along paths established by migratory birds and animals, as a consequence of new genetic splices between human and animal symbionts.  

One of the most controversial elements of the book is its focus on depopulation as necessary for human survival. It is central to her Camille fabulations. Haraway mentions the problematic eugenicist echoes inevitably attendant on any mention of population control in the book itself but maintains that it is crucial to sustain all forms of life on earth to reduce the numbers of humans occupying it. We might counter that it is unequal distribution of resources rather than lack of resources per se that is the problem for humanity. She has replied to critics who found this element of Staying with the Trouble difficult. If controlled by women at the local level rather than by the state then perhaps planned degrowth in human numbers is justifiable. In theory, Haraway’s Camille stories, and the slogan ‘Make kin not babies’ do question reproductive futurism (Edelman, 2004), but the stories focus in quite conventional ways on each new generation Camille as per grows from childhood to adulthood and in per turn, teaches the next Camille, before dying gracefully (sometimes at extreme old age by our standards). How might Haraway have rethought ageing and generations within her story framework and her conception of Staying with the Trouble?

5. A Post-Apocalyptic Scenario

AbduMaliq Simone’s provocative book, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities, seeks to burst a widespread myth: that
African cities do not work. The myth, Simone suggests, problematically centers the marginalized and poor as being locked into passivity and
suffering, with growth and egalitarian gain being stalled. Rejecting this
vision, Simone unearths a continent of cities that exhibit a kind of “urban
becoming.” Here, people locked into tough circumstances have keen
visions, exhibit reflexiveness and creativity, and actively strive to invent
new visions and designs in order to enhance general qualities of life.
Simone’s project, to us, is a humanist undertaking, an attempt to capture
the power and agency of seemingly disempowered individuals on the
ground of destroyed and disjunctured cities who do not give up hope in
the face of grim everyday circumstances.

Simone calls this muddy, messy human striking-out ‘people as
infrastructure,’ identifying a kind of under-the-radar political resistance
that displays a number of distinctive attributes. First, this politics involves
the forming of informal, impromptu alliances that are elaborate
collaborations tied to alternative visions of what their city and society
truly is and can be. Second, people deftly read current political conditions
and respond to these in reflexive, just-in-time ways. Third, this politics problematizes current activities and practices less than the meanings that
lie embedded in these activities and practices. Fourth, this politics
involves a space making which is designed to capture permanent, resilient
sets of social relations and visions. Fifth, this politics works through
memory, renditions of history, and human aspirations as a kind of spectral
haunting. Throughout, this politics, to Simone, is always a work in
progress and in a state of becoming in a shifting world that is
continuously being negotiated and re-negotiated.

We collectively found Yet To Come an empirically grounded but
theoretically informed tome that is thoughtful in its constitution of ideas.
We agree that it is not an overly romantic book which unabashedly extolls
the virtues and purities of its principal subject, the poor and marginalized in Africa’s cities. We also suggest that this work is sufficiently attentive to
structures in its understanding of urban everyday life, with these
structures being sensitively treated, i.e., they are not closed and simply
restricting. Instead, structures in this work exhibit an openness and
fluidity which is shown to create opportunities for new ways in addition to
being constrictive frames. Moreover, we found the work to be wonderfully
attuned to a sense of contingency which, in Simone’s theorizing, implants
the seedbed of possibility in the unbroken flow of the everyday.
Contingency here deftly melds with the author’s notion of structure, which
allows Simone to recognize contingent structures in a way that identifies
enablements as well as constraints, a welcome addition to how this notion
has historically been treated. Also, the work is seen to be nicely rooted in
real people on the ground. Using abstract theory but in a nuanced way,
theoretical principles are seen to meld with common, everyday conduct in
a way that never decenters the power of the agent but who is an analytic
object always subject to framing and multi-scalar processes.

An additional strength of the work is its seamless integration of the
concepts of apocalypse and post-apocalypse into its analysis. The offer of
post-apocalypse most resonated with us; we agreed that African cities are
posited as having gone through a kind of hell and have come out the other
side. Now, in a post-apocalyptic state, the critical issue becomes what
happens now? How can the marginalized and punished in everyday life
rebound from decades of dysfunctional and ineffectual governances,
economies, and institutions, seize their lives and move them forward
progressively? Given this level of specificity, the collective agreed that
Simone’s thesis is a strong addition to the kind of theorizing of political
resistance that Donna Haraway (our previous reading) provides for us.
While Haraway’s thesis delivers an important mega-theorizing in its broad
sweep and totalization, Simone theorizes at the interstices of these
general propositions.

Finally, we collectively felt that there was room for more nuance in
the book. In particular, the book failed to trace out any failures from
people implementing this under-the-radar politics in everyday life. This omission, to us, erased the possibility of teasing out how this politics can
fail, as well as the forces that resulted in the failure, and what could be done in the future to prevent said failure. At the same time, the author missed the
possibility of more deeply interrogating a central analytic object in the
book, “story-telling.” To us, the story could have been fruitfully treated as
a “traveling thing,” a complicated amalgam of forces and processes, and
an element unwittingly tinged by contradiction, oxymoron, and counter-
productive rhetoric.

6. Noospheric Visions

The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader surveys the concept of the "noosphere," a term that stands for the sphere of human thought and intellect, and its relationship to the "biosphere." The book traces the evolution of the noosphere idea from its inception by early 20th-century thinkers to its implications in contemporary environmental and social contexts, framed as they are by apocalyptic concerns about species loss, global warming, and anthropogenic climate change. As the book shows, the noosphere, representing an advanced stage of Earth's intellectual and cultural development following the geosphere and the biosphere, was brought into prominence by figures like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky.

The noosphere concept encapsulates the global expansion of reflexive, conscious matter, setting Earth apart from being a purely physical/chemical system. This evolution occurred through stages – from hominization and human migration to its consolidation through industry and science. Unlike Anthropocene, the noosphere's dual nature encompasses both material aspects, like technology and economy, and spiritual ones, fostering indefinite interpretations.

The book was authored at the end of the 20th century, following the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol (1997), which mandated participating nations to lower their greenhouse gas emissions. The book’s publication during this period, characterized by a sense of optimism, helps to contextualize the anthology's relatively positive perspective. With a foreword by Mikhail Gorbachev, the noosphere is proposed as a philosophy for realizing human potential within biospheric constraints. The book covers the origins of the biosphere and noosphere concepts, the key thinkers behind noosphere theory, and contemporary parallels like the Gaia theory (named after the Greek goddess Gaia, a scientific hypothesis by environmentalist James Lovelock, suggesting that Earth's biological systems act as a single, self-regulating entity). The discussion extends into the future implications of the noosphere, particularly in relation to the internet and computer networks.

During our group discussion, we offered a critical analysis of the noosphere concept, questioning its purported advantages over the Anthropocene perspective. We recognized that, while the idea of the noosphere stimulates thought, it also has its shortcomings. These include its predominantly male, Western/Christian viewpoint and an excessive dependence on human intellect and human agency, which is seen as fundamentally separate from the biosphere. Nevertheless, as mentioned, we appreciated how the concept of the noosphere opens up a variety of important historical perspectives on the theme of human interaction with nature and gives us a longer view of the concept of the Anthropocene. The anthology presents a range of discussions on the noosphere, exploring it from both a creative evolutionary angle and as a force driven by a transcendent spiritual energy.

The noosphere is portrayed as the earth's spirit, representing an urge towards balance that integrates both the operations of the natural world and human endeavors. This portrayal prompted us to investigate further into the spiritual aspects of human engagement with nature. We are particularly interested in how in the 21^st century particular local spiritual beliefs might offer solace in the face of environmental catastrophes and apocalyptic scenarios, yet potentially also deter proactive measures to mitigate environmental harm.

Ultimately, we concluded that the Reader provides a thorough prelude to the Anthropocene era. It prompts us to reflect on why such a body of literature, which explores the spiritual (and more positive) dimensions of human involvement with nature, has often been overlooked in mainstream discussions about the Anthropocene. This exploration has opened up new avenues for us to consider the multifaceted relationship between humanity and the natural world.

7. Thoughts on the Apocalypse from the East

Investigating apocalyptic traditions other than the Judeo-Christian, we began with Tibetan Buddhism, which involves the recognition of the importance of a cyclical understanding of apocalyptic destruction as a repeating phase in a longer cycle of decline and rebirth, rather than the end of all things. Within these larger cycles, however, it is possible for the individual’s actions to have long-term effects, including on the living circumstances one encounters. This involves common responsibilities, such as for the environment. Drawing on its historical origins and local cultural contexts, Tibetan Buddhism can be positioned as a philosophical resource allowing us a way of ‘staying or living with the trouble.’ It provides a framework, template, or code of ethics, as much as a belief system or faith. It has been used by anti-colonialists in the South-Asian context, where the connections between Buddhism and Marxism (for example in the work of B. R. Ambedkar) have created a mode of challenge to those in power. The concept of a cyclical utopian/dystopian structure is notably adaptable and can be applied in various contexts. However, it's important to recognize that such ideas can be co-opted and misused by specific groups, including nationalists or political factions. This can lead to their incorporation into nationalistic movements, as exemplified by historical conflicts in Sri Lanka. Additionally, Buddhism and similar ideologies can be interpreted in ways that align with deconstructive practices. This includes the acceptance of the destruction of certain groups, ideas, and artifacts as an inevitable part of life, as framed within the context of these religious ideologies.

More recently, it has found a place in Extinction Rebellion and Last Generation movements via slow marches, practices of meditation and the recognition (by Karmapa Thaye, for example) that there is an ‘inner climate change emergency,’ involving heated emotions, that is inseparable from the outer climate emergency.

Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man can be situated in the Islamic world context as part of a number of 1960s critiques of big state science that involved disenchantment with high modernism and ‘official’ anti-colonial narratives. It is written by Seyyed Hossein Nasr – a former professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, and a prominent scholar of Islamic philosophy. A graduate of MIT and Harvard, he was first an expert in physics and the philosophy of science before turning his focus to Islamic studies. He has been a prominent figure in "perennial philosophy" which holds that there are eternal truths contained within all religious traditions.

His works integrate Islamic philosophy with modern science and the Western philosophical tradition. He has been both praised for the depth of his traditional Islamic scholarship and critiqued for not being critical enough of the premodern Islamic intellectual tradition. Nasr's philosophical work exploring the relationship between humanity and nature emerged concurrently with the rise of environmentalism in 1960s-70s American counterculture. During this period, architects, religious thinkers, and spiritual leaders similarly turned their attention to humanity's bond with the natural world in light of escalating environmental threats. Our discussion group noted strong parallels between Nasr's writing and postcolonial thought, particularly regarding the need to redefine humans' orientation to modernity, technology, and unrestrained development. By spotlighting the sacred within nature and Islamic ideas of cosmological harmony, Nasr provides a sharp critique of Western industrial modernity's perceived dominance over the natural environment and the human soul. Furthermore, his work aims in part to empower the colonized mind by offering ideological alternatives to positivist and secular scientific worldviews. Situated in the context of ongoing intellectual decolonization movements, Nasr contributes a spiritual ecology emanating from classical Islamic theology to affirm the enchantment of nature and reconfigure postcolonial humanity's relationship with it.

Despite its romanticized and problematic feminization's of nature, and a positioning of the state and official science as monolithic, its prioritization of the spiritual as a way of dealing with social differences makes equality a concept with which people in the Global South could become ‘re-enchanted.’ In Man and Nature, Nasr also recognizes that science needs to be part of a values system. Contemporary environmental discourse engaged with the concept of the Anthropocene—the current geological epoch defined by substantial human impact on Earth's ecosystems—would benefit from acknowledging the ideas of intellectuals like Nasr. His writing represents an early attempt to decolonize dominant Western notions of humanity's relationship to nature by challenging secular-scientific worldviews and revitalizing non-Western, Islamic cosmological perspectives. Nasr contributed a spiritual framework rooted in Islamic theology and philosophy to posit nature as divinely inspired, purposeful, and inviolable rather than as a reservoir of resources intended solely for uncontrolled development and exploitation. His work resists attitudes toward technological mastery over nature. While not unproblematic or universally endorsed, Nasr's perspective challenges us to consider more pluralistic epistemologies of environmental ethics emerging from the Global South. His work can lead us to greater wisdom and insight into navigating this difficult period with justice and sustainability.

8. Indigenous Apocalypses

 According to Philip Hayward (in his article, “Firing up the Anthropocene: Conflagration, Representation and Temporality in Modern Australia”), the co-existence of fire and nature goes back to the pre-colonial period in Australia. Since colonization, however, the building up of the environment and loss of Indigenous fire management practices have led to increasingly severe and apocalyptic fires in particularly Eastern Australia. Imagery of a fiery apocalypse was present through the settler colonial period and has also been present in the postcolonial period. 19th century paintings represent fire very symbolically, imagining the fire as a White, female figure. They use the battlefield imagery that is also present in current writing about fighting fires. Indigenous cyclical burning practices were a form of eco-system management – they removed combustible materials and did not damage soil, plant root, systems, or seeds. They allowed fauna to escape. This knowledge accepted and adapted to destruction as a part of life rather than viewing potentially destructive natural forces as something apocalyptic to be resisted and conquered. At the heart of Hayward’s book are crucial questions: What is at the root of the colonial attitude to indigenous fire management practices? Why were these obliterated? Were they viewed as politically subversive, or as primitive? Unlike Buddhist and Islamic cultures, which were ‘othered,’ but recognized as cultures which had a long history and with which there were recognized trade routes, native Australian cultures were not even ‘seen.’ In fact, fire management was part of the Dreaming Stories, which complement Indigenous Australians’ understanding of the Dreaming Time, an asset (a way of understanding time that combines past present and future) that counters the colonial idea of Tempus nullius (the past as empty and unclaimed). Accompanying that concept is the idea of the Future as another Tempus nullius where fears of apocalyptic climate change and devastation can be dumped; this action then avoids doing anything in the present to change extractivist behavior. Representation of fires as sublime events thus positions them outside the temporal present. Rather, we need to admit apocalyptic future fires into our understanding of the present so that we can make adaptive changes that might impact the future.

To Kyle Whyte (in “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change”), Anthropocene narratives’ focus on future dystopian climate crisis ignores Indigenous peoples’ understanding of the already-existing link between climate change and former colonial violence in which climate change and species loss are not things to position in the future, but things that have already happened to Native and Indigenous peoples. Whyte argues that crisis is therefore seen as ongoing rather than upcoming. This relates to the Anishanaabe conception of intergenerational time, where we live alongside past and future relatives in a spiralling temporality. Native American story telling is thus inherently science fictional or speculative in its treatment of time and frequently makes use of counter factual thinking. It can be described as ‘living Indigenous science fiction’ (Whyte 2018, 230). Allies wanting to support and work with Indigenous peoples should avoid narratives that position Indigenous peoples within the Holocene (as ‘Holocene survivors’), as if they have not been affected by settler colonialism and are part of the past. They should not assume that the climate crisis in the Anthropocene marks something that is being ‘done to’ Indigenous peoples or represents a steady deterioration without remedy unless by a White Savior.

In “Decolonial Eschatologies of Native American Literatures,” Adam Spry takes the argument one stage further by showing how contemporary Native Americans not only use apocalyptic rhetoric to describe their current and historical situations, post 1492, but also use it to describe what they want to happen (or what they think will happen) to White Americans. Native Americans imagine apocalypse as ‘an opportunity for the (Native) world to be made whole (Spry 2020, 56). This is envisaged as a ‘counter-apocalypse’ that is about the resumption of history not its end (2020, 57). Apocalypse stands in for decolonization and is often a utopian way of thinking that focuses on renewed tribal nationhood and control over Indigenous land. The nation state is something that is present and recreated rather than lost, as it is in conventional post-apocalyptic fiction, constituting an Indigenous nationalism (which can be quite varied in its aims, from pan-Indigenous solidarity to cultural revitalization, or freedom of thought and selfhood). The interesting counter-historical novel by Martin Cruz Smith, The Indians Won (1970) imagines a coalition of Native American tribes, supported by European industrialists, winning the Battle of Little Bighorn (1876) and creating an Indigenous nation that crosses the North American continent. The year before publication, a pan-tribal coalition of Native American activists occupied the abandoned prison at Alcatraz. In Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017) the reservation is the only place not substantially affected by the apocalyptic alterations to human reproduction and evolution that impact the rest of the US. Spry argues that it is the cultural homogeneity of the imagined Indigenous reservation nation state that allows it to resist apocalyptic change. This is a very contentious point, encouraging (implicitly) a sort of essentialism (and maybe not even, in Spivak’s terms, a strategic essentialism) as a mode of contestation. This can also be seen to an extent in Rebecca Roanhorse’s The Trail of Lightning (2018), which imagines the Navajo Nation Reservation surviving the collapse of the US as a consequence of climate-related flooding. Spry argues that this fantasy novel makes use of ‘apolitical messianism’ in the face of the imagined collapse of the settler-state, rather than admitting that the decolonial project will involve work, struggle and (probably) violence. These sorts of imagined apocalyptic futures position Native culture and identity outside secular, modern time, and assume that Native Americans are essentially different (valorizing rather than pathologizing that difference as settler colonialism has done). Stephen Graham Jones’s The Bird is Gone (2003) imagines a sovereign Indigenous Territory that is created as a consequence of laws protecting and restoring the flora and fauna of the Great Plains. This does not go well, however – concluding in its own apocalyptic event. The supposed celebration of Native American culture is ‘actually a kind of domination’ (Spry 2020, 65) that encourages the forgetting of settler violence and demands the performance of a ‘pure’ Indigenous, cultural identity, untainted by violent settler culture. Spry ends by arguing that only via stories and narratives shared amongst Native American peoples can there be any positive decolonial future. Is this utopian conclusion adequate?

How do we differentiate between settler colonialisms and Indigenous cultural practices? Differences between these should not be collapsed, yet there are some interesting similarities in terms of beliefs about time, an acceptance of dependence on, rather than vulnerability in the face of, natural forces such as flood and fire and the presence of (semi)-nomadism as a way of life in which migration is normative. Making use of these ideas in order to change ways of thinking about and alter and improve the world’s future is important, but how can they work alongside technological innovation, which can’t be ‘disappeared’? How do brilliant analyses that focus on culture and literature work their way into action, activism, and policy and technological recommendations and, simultaneously, should they? Who has legitimacy to claim the authorial voice and assume the subject position as authors of these articles, or ‘for’ Indigenous peoples?

Sources

1. Chakrabarty, ‘Planetary Aspirations: Reading a Suicide in India’, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. University of Chicago Press, 2021.

2. Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Duke University Press, 2017.  

3. Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Back Anthropocenes, Or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

4. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. 

5. AbduMaliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Duke University Press, 2004. 

6. Paul R. Samson and David Pitt, The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader: Global Environment, Society and Change. Routledge, 1999.

7. Rolf Scheuermann, ‘Tibetan Buddhist Dystopian Narratives and their Pedagogical Dimensions’, The End(s) of Time(s): Apocalypticism, Messianism and Utopianism Through the Ages ed. Hans-Christian Lehner. Brill, 2021.

8. Syed Hossain Nasr, Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man [1968] Mandala Unwin, 1990.

9. Philip Heyward, ‘Firing up the Anthropocene: Conflagration, Representation and Temporality in Modern Australia’, Text Matters, 12, 2022. 

10. Kyle P. Whyte, ‘Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change,’ Environment and Planning E Nature and Space, 2018, 1 (1-2) 224-242. 

11. Adam Spry, ‘Decolonial Eschatologies of Native American Literatures’, in Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture ed. John Hay. Cambridge UP, 2020.