Deadline for Submission of Abstracts: 30th July 2015.
Deadline for Submission of full paper: 20th September 2015
Theme Description:
It was Paul Crutzen, chemist and 1995 Nobel Prize laureate, who popularized the term “Anthropocene.” The term originally concerned those in the natural sciences, but it has evolved into a discourse that now also permeates the humanities and social sciences. According to Crutzen, it is human beings who exploit 30-50% of the planet’s land surface, and who have substantially transformed that landscape. Tropical rain forests are disappearing faster than ever, and this has irrevocably altered weather patterns, ecosystems, and the geologic conditions of the earth itself. Fossil fuel burning and agriculture, he adds, have been among the most instrumental forces in increasing the emission of carbon dioxide by 30%, and of methane by more than 100%, in this era (“Geology of Mankind” 23). Such increases have created and sustained human-induced phenomena such as greenhouse gas effects that result in an accelerated pace of global warming.
In the last couple of decades the concerns of global warming have now expanded far beyond the domains of the physical sciences, and have become of increased importance to politics and society on both domestic and international levels. International cooperative scientific endeavors have emerged, and collaborative efforts to combat global warming have been attempted through treaties and other proposals. Yet these have deeply challenged existing regimes of national interest, national economic policies. All nations have become dependent upon fossil fuels over the last two centuries, and that dependence has facilitated geo-politics for just as long—as nations, colonial regimes, and empires have scrambled for position over those natural resources. How global warming driven by fossil fuel consumption and the pressing need for alternative forms of energy fracture and reconfigure geopolitics at this stage of the Anthropocene has yet to be realized. Recognizing and responding to these new conditions that have coalesced into the discourse of the Anthropocene cannot be done on simply local, regional, or national levels, as the whole of the earth and the entirety of the human species is precisely what is at stake. And the next regime of history stands to be determined by its successes and failures.
The July-December 2015 issue of Humanities Circle proposes to specifically engage the Anthropocene from the place of the humanities and social sciences. As a point of departure, HC would like to encourage a focus on the prominent historian and social scientist Dipesh Chakrabarty’s proposal in two articles: (1) “The Climate Of History, Critical Inquiry 35, (Winter 2009), (2) “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories” Critical Inquiry 41, (Autumn 2014). Chakrabarty suggests that new ways of imagining the historical and contemporary human impact upon the world under the conditions of the Anthropocene require both overcoming the limits of ecological histories that treat the natural environment independently of human beings and their activities in the world, and overcoming the limits of approaches that treat human beings in discrete social, political, regional, or national units that cannot grasp the collective impacts of human existence as a whole. There has been no point in human history when humans were not biological agents, but “we become geological agents only historically and collectively”. The task of criticism in the Anthropocene, as Chakrabarty has it, can only be to “scale up” the imagination of the human, and imagine the “human impact on the planet on a geological scale.”
The sum total of the consequences of human actions – such as climate change, global warming, carbon emission, mass extinction, oceanic acidification and soil degradation – escapes the human sensorium as it remains outside the reach of directly approachable human experience. Yet, Chakrabarty argues, “climate change poses for us a question of a human collectivity, an ‘us’, pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience the world. It is more like a universal that arises from a shared sense of a catastrophe”. As a consequence, it is clear now that “for humans any thought of the way out of our current predicament cannot but refer to the idea of deploying reason on a global collective level.” Hence, “in the era of the Anthropocene we need the Enlightenment (that is, reason) even more than in the past.” At the same time, politics is never about the rational alone, and the crisis of climate change produces anxieties around futures that cannot be readily visualized. Therefore “the task of placing historically the crisis of climate change thus requires us to bring together intellectual formations that are somewhat in tension with each other: the planetary and the global; deep and recorded histories; species thinking and critiques of capital. This unity is only possible through a collective self-recognition as a species.”
Against the backdrop of the emerging discourse of the Anthropocene, and Chakrabarty’s framing of these questions, we invite original research papers largely upon, but not limited to, the following sub-themes:
Freedom in the Anthropocene
History in the Anthropocene
Critical theory in the Anthropocene
Interdisciplinarity in the Anthropocene
Democracy in the Anthropocene
Universalism and universality in the Anthropocene
Ontology and the Anthropocene
Climate science and social sciences
Earth sciences and humanities
Postcolonial studies in the Anthropocene
Humanism in the Anthropocene
Post-humanism and the Anthropocene
Capital in the Anthropocene
Eco-ethics in the Anthropocene
Literature in the Anthropocene
Ideology of the Anthropocene
Species being and the Anthropocene
Gender in the Anthropocene
Climate Change and the Humanities
Critical Humanities in the Anthropocene
Self/subjectivity/agency in the Anthropocene
New Materialism and Anthropocene
Marxism in the Anthropocene
Grandnarratives in the Anthropocene
For submission and other queries, please email/contact:
Dr. Prasad Pannian
Editor, Humanities Circle
Central University of Kerala
Vidyanagar PO, Kasaragod
Kerala, 671123, India.
Phone: 9446460202 (cell)
prasadpannian@gmail.com
humanitiescircle@gmail.com
Central University of Kerala
(Established by an Act of Parliament, 2009)
www.cukerala.ac.in