FRAGMENTS FOR A POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 35

In the second article, Chakrabarty (2012) argues that climate change challenges
postcolonial studies by forcing us to deal with a new 'human'. To summarise,
Charkabarty argues that historically there are three images of the human. The first
is the Enlightenment notion of the human as a universal category with the capacity
to bear rights. The second is the postcolonial-postmodern view that views the
human as differentiated according to class, sexuality, gender, history, etc. The
second sense acts a corrective to the first since underneath it still relies on an
Enlightenment conception of the human. The final and most recent image, which
challenges the first two, is the figure of the human in the age of the Anthropocene
where humans collectively emerge as a geological force on the planet (ibid.: 2).
First, even presuming the periodisation to be uncontested, 6 this dating of the
Anthropocene as beginning in the Enlightenment begs the question of its
relationship to colonisation and imperialism. The Industrial Revolution, which is
the beginning of the ever expanding use of fossil fuels, is praised by historians of
modernity as a sign of progress, inventiveness and modern civilisation, while
downplaying the centrality of extensive resource extraction from British and other
European colonies which actually drove this revolution. Yet the same period
viewed as the beginning of the demise of our planetary ecology is decoupled from
its European moorings to implicate all humanity under the title 'Anthropocene'.
If we take the periodisation at face value, a fairer and more precise term would be
Eurocene or Anglocene.
Second, and leaving aside my disagreement with the second image of the human
(I do not think it necessary to pose a universal human underneath anthropological
difference to maintain a postcolonial position), what is clear here is that the
'challenge' articulated by climate change is primarily a conceptual one. The
challenge is double here: the human conceptualised as differently universal and the
human reconceptualised as one among many species.
Regarding the first challenge, while I agree to the extent that one can ideally
separate these varying conceptions of the human, I am concerned that this
separation is never constant in practice. As Chakrabarty himself points out in the
second article, these images continue to be in competition with each other in the
present (Chakrabarty, 2012: 2). I suggest that this competition can work through
modes of co-optation, where the narrow 'human' of the European Enlightenment
has the potential to be disguised in Anthropocenic clothes. In relation to the latter
challenge, it is difficult to imagine how the conception of the human can be
disentangled from nature, given the continued pervasiveness of anthropocentrism
and anthropomorphism. In such instances, nature is not only conceptualised in
binary terms from the human, it is often humanised and personified in various ways.
Consequently, how we deal with nature is often a reflection of how we deal with
humans and is thus reflective of human politics. In the next section, I turn to
invasion rhetoric of environmental security as one area in which these two
problems are apparent.