Introduction: The Anthropocene and the Human Sciences
Prasad Pannian
1. To What Extent is the Anthropocene a Historical Moment?: Of Geological Addiction
Catherine Malabou
2. The Discourse on the Human in Philosophical Retrospect
Jibu Mathew George
3. Mapping the Observer in the Observation in the Anthropocene: A Methodological Exploration
Meera Baindur and Kalpita Bhar Paul
4. The Anthropocene’s Negative Media
Melody Jue
5. The Anthropocene: Call for an Ontological Unity in Nature
Hareesh A. G. and Upendra C.
6. From the Anthropocene to the Neo-tiNaicene
Nirmal Selvamony
7. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear Destiny: Customising Manuel DeLanda for the Formation of South Asian Histories
Sheeju N. V.
8. Cli-fi as the Literature of the Anthropocene: An Analysis of T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth
Pooja Agarwal
9. Of All Things (Un)Naturally Plastic: Biomes of the Anthropocene and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
Sugi G
Biography
Prasad Pannian teaches in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the Central University of Kerala, India. He is the author of Edward Said and the Question of Subjectivity and was the Edward W. Said Fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University in the City of New York, 2019.
This volume, first published in 2015 as a special issue of Humanities Circle from the Central University of Kerala, was among the earliest significant humanist contributions from India to Anthropocene studies. Curated and now reintroduced by Prasad Pannian, it brings together a creative group of contributors whose essays opened conversations in India that have since expanded in scope and gained a renewed urgency. This pioneering intervention still retains its freshness and relevance. The Routledge edition will bring these important essays to the wider readership they have always deserved.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, University of Chicago, USA
This book is a fantastic collection of deeply reflective articles on the relation between humanities and the increasingly important concept of the anthropocene. It shows how to draw upon, but at the same time expand on, global concepts with sensitivity to the local, as well as illustrate how global scholarship can draw from such local engagements across the planetary world. At the same time, it raises new ethical questions on the role of the Humanities in the age of the anthropocene.
Sundar Sarukkai, Founder, Barefoot Philosophers
A riveting collection of essays, probing and prismatic, where the human and the anthropos are stretched out against each other with the rumblings and roar of the Anthropocene. This book is cross discursive and sets the emotional band in a kinetic field involving the human, nonhuman, things and phenomena. A disturbing and reflective place to go, it re-harvests the anthropocene-human bind with truth and trembling.
Ranjan Ghosh, Department of English, University of North Bengal, India and author of The Plastic Turn & Plastic Tagore
The Anthropocene might appear to have rendered the humanities otiose by demanding a return to the planet after decades of social construction and radical historicism. Following Dipesh Chakrabarty’s insistence that the climate of history has changed irrevocably, the humanities has been presented with the challenge of addressing its non-human conditions. These wide-ranging and formidable essays chart a rigorous path between reductive literalism and literary complexity, exploring the Anthropocene as a planetary event of productive complexity and political provocation. Unified by a refusal to see the Anthropocene as either a foundation or end, this collection is necessary reading for anyone working in the humanities or the social sciences who dares to recognize the planetary conditions of thinking any possible future.
Clare Colebrook, Cultural Theorist and Cecile Parrish Chair of Literature, Monash University
This book shows how, rather than only identifying the condition of the Anthropocene, as the contents of the volume aspired to do when they were originally published a decade back, the need now is to also learn how to live within it, a Harawayan "staying with the trouble", perhaps. It shows most convincingly how this "Inhabiting the Anthropocene" can happen through the invocation of a "critical planetary humanism", where the consciousness of anthropogenic geological and environmental changes must be coupled with an awareness of human inequality, vulnerability, resilience, and survival. A must-read for anyone who cares about this planet and its inhabitants.
Saugata Baduri, Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
Opening with Catherine Malabou’s bold vision of the Anthropocene as a “geological addiction,” Inhabiting the Anthropocene brings new life to the pioneering 2015 special issue of Humanities Circle. From the frontlines of South Asia’s ecological crises, this collection connects these pioneering essays to urgent global debates on capital, empire, and planetary care. Timely and thought-provoking, this volume invites readers to rethink what it means to inhabit a damaged planet, and to imagine more just and livable futures.
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Professor of Global Communication and Director of Cross-Cultural Studies, Kyung Hee University
