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constitution' and 'historico-cultural contexts' are met with eyeball rolling at
de
rigueur
conferences. Simultaneously, issues of identity have seemingly receded into
the past, with 'identity politics' in particular increasingly portrayed as a period of
navel-gazing victimisation. While these tendencies are not evident among the
prominent authors of the field, the general rank-and-file have taken to this 'turn'
as a substitute for previous approaches, theories, topics and methods. As one
conference participant bluntly put it to me: 'Yes, yes, we all know about racism,
but what about climate change?'
I hope the reader can forgive me my suspicions, but as a cultural scholar of race
and racism I cannot help but feel that this has been a most opportune shift for some.
For a long stretch of history, most people on this world had been relegated to the
status of sub- or infra-humans, the fact of which was used to exclude or excise them
from the realm not simply of political rights but also of full participation in social
and economic life.
5
The political, and often violent, struggles (whether feminist,
anti-racist or queer) to be incorporated in the historically narrow category of
'humanity' are quite recent in our collective history but have had limited and
uneven success. Consequently, I am suspicious when just as the category of the
human is (reluctantly) opening to incorporate non-normative genders, sexualities
and racialised (and less successfully differently-abled) people, the human is once
again returned to a universal category under the rubric of climate change, global
warming and/or the Anthropocene.
A more articulate challenge to postcolonialism by the discourse of climate
change is put forward by Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty, author of
Provincialising
Europe
, is one of the world's foremost postcolonial scholars whose nuanced
challenge needs to be considered carefully. In two recent articles, Dipesh
Chakrabarty implicitly asks about the status of the 'anthropos' (Greek for 'human')
in the Anthropocene. The first article, 'The Climate of History: Four Theses'
(2009), deals with the relation between the human and nature, while the second
article, 'Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change' (2012), deals
with different conceptions of the human.
In the first article, Chakrabarty (2009) contends that the planetary crisis of
climate change demands we collapse the age-old distinction between human and
natural history. Human history, human culture has become a geological force and
in order to grapple with this, he argues, we need to come to terms with 'deep
history' and to reconceive human history as a history
of
a species, one among many
others on the planet. For Chakrabarty, this means reconceptualising the struggle
for freedom (whether class, gender, slavery or imperial oppression), which he
equates to the last 250 years beginning with the Enlightenment, as simultaneously
the time when humans switched from wood and renewable fuels to fossil fuels.
'The mansion of freedom,' he writes, 'stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-
fuel use.' For this reason, he argues, we must reconceptualise the narrow project
of human freedom in favour of freedom as a struggle not only to preserve human
life but also the conditions under which human life and other forms of life can
flourish on this planet.
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