FRAGMENTS FOR A POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 31

FRAGMENTS FOR A POSTCOLONIAL
CRITIQUE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE
Invasion biology and environmental security
Gilbert Caluya
Despite the tenuous status of the concept of the 'Anthropocene' within the field
of geology, the concept has nevertheless garnered growing interest from the
humanities and social sciences. The Anthropocene is used to mark a period of time
when human activity has drastically changed the face of the world such that it
approaches a geological force. As a concept, it helps us to grasp the immensity of
the problem of climate change, to grapple with its global nature, and it acts as a
banner to rally us into responsibility. Some argue that this instantiates a new
humanities or, at the very least, that the humanities must now undo much of their
prior thinking to meet this call for responsibility. Yet the humanities have long
argued for a more environmentally conscious approach to life and living. So what
precisely do the humanities and social sciences gain from the concept of the
'Anthropocene'? Or, more importantly, what gets left out of the picture when we
use this lens?
This chapter argues that how we go about managing and protecting nature can
often reinscribe human systems of oppression and discrimination, drawing on
invasion biology as its example. The first section introduces the concept of the
Anthropocene while tracing its movement from the sciences to the humanities,
where it has been recently posed by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2012) as a 'challenge' to
postcolonial studies. While in general I agree with Chakrabarty's claim that 'the
human' under the Anthropocene theoretically challenges the human conceptualised
in the Enlightenment and in postcolonialism respectively, I suggest that the former
is liable to be co-opted by the Enlightenment version of the human if postcolonial
critiques are not taken seriously. This argument is posed through the example of
invasion biology to which the following sections turn. It begins by contextualising
invasion biology within imperial ecology in order to trace the conceptual con-
nections between nature and the human under colonial/imperial histories of
oppression. The final section returns to the present, drawing on disparate cultural