scholarly journals The Earth as Pinprick: Some Early Western Challenges to Anthropocentrism // La Tierra como punta de alfiler: Algunos desafíos tempranos al antropocentrismo en occidente

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-175
Author(s):  
Bryan Moore
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Twenty First Century

      It is common to assume that the ancient Greeks and Romans were essentially anthropocentric in point of view. While this is partly true (as it is today), the ancients established important precedents that challenge and overturn this view, anticipating modern science and even Darwin and beyond. This article analyzes texts from the Presocratics to late antiquity to show how the questioning of anthropocentrism developed over roughly 800 years. This matters because overcoming our present ecological crises demands that we reassess our place on the earth and draw down our impact on the planet. The ancients show that the questioning of anthropocentrism it nothing new; their work is part of the bridge required to help us move more responsibly into the later parts of the twenty-first century and beyond. Resumen        Es común asumir que los griegos y romanos antiguos tenían un punto de vista esencialmente antropocéntrico. Aunque esto es cierto en parte (como hoy en día), los antiguos establecieron precedentes importantes que desafían y dan la vuelta a esta perspectiva, anticipándose a la ciencia moderna e incluso a Darwin y más allá. Este artículo analiza textos desde los Presocráticos hasta la antigüedad tardía para mostrar cómo se cuestionó el antropocentrismo durante aproximadamente 800 años. Esto es importante porque para vencer las crisis ecológicas actuales es necesario que re-evaluemos nuestro lugar en la tierra y que reduzcamos nuestro impacto en el planeta. Los antiguos demuestran que cuestionarse el antropocentrismo no es nada nuevo; su trabajo es parte del puente necesario para ayudarnos a trasladarnos más responsablemente hacia el último periodo del siglo XXI y más allá.

Slavery and the Trumpocene: It's Not the End of the World

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Claire Colebrook
Keyword(s):  
Living System ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
The West ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Geological Period

There is something more catastrophic than the end of the world, especially when ‘world’ is understood as the horizon of meaning and expectation that has composed the West. If the Anthropocene is the geological period marking the point at which the earth as a living system has been altered by ‘anthropos,’ the Trumpocene marks the twenty-first-century recognition that the destruction of the planet has occurred by way of racial violence, slavery and annihilation. Rather than saving the world, recognizing the Trumpocene demands that we think about destroying the barbarism that has marked the earth.

scholarly journals Revolutionary in Counter-Revolutionary Times: Elaborating Fanonian National Consciousness into the Twenty-First Century

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Anna Gordon
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Global Context ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Twenty First Century

One of the unique challenges of reading Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) today is that while it is an irredeemably revolutionary text, we live in a counter-revolutionary moment or in a global context that has tried very hard to discredit even the possibility of revolution. Fanon’s text does not only narrate the effective undertaking of an anti-colonial struggle—of what is required for people to identify the actual causes of their alienation and unfreedom and together to will their elimination—it also outlines the various, often dialectical challenges of restructuring a society from the bottom up. Guiding and evident in the latter is the flourishing of what Fanon suggestively called national consciousness. Elaborating its meaning and ongoing usefulness is the focus of this essay.

Reflecting the Nation: Costa Rican Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 113-180
Author(s):  
Liz Harvey-Kattou
Keyword(s):  
Costa Rica ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Costa Rican ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
San Jose ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Marginalised Groups ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The City

This chapter argues that cinema has been the primary creative vehicle to reflect on national – tico – identity in Costa Rica in the twenty-first century, and it begins with an overview of the industry. Considering the ways in which film is uniquely positioned to challenge social norms through the creation of affective narratives and through the visibility it can offer to otherwise marginalised groups, this chapter analyses four films by key directors. Beginning with an exploration of Esteban Ramírez’s Gestación, it considers youth culture, gender, and class as non-normative spaces in the city of San José. Similarly, Jurgen Ureña’s Abrázame como antes is then discussed from the point of view of its ground-breaking portrayal of trans women in the capital. Two films shot at the geographic margins of the nation are then discussed, with the uncanny coastline the focus of Paz Fábrega’s Agua fría de mar and the marginalized Afro-Costa Rican province of Limón the focus of Patricia Velásquez’s Dos aguas.

scholarly journals The Humanities as Contradiction: Against the New Enclosures

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Christopher Breu
Keyword(s):  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
Dialectical Tension ◽  
Level Of Knowledge ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Twenty First Century

This essay begins by surveying our current moment in the humanities, diagnosing the language of crisis that frames much of the discourse about them. It argues that the crisis is a manufactured economic one not a symbolic one. The problems with many recent proposals—such as the new aestheticism, surface reading, and postcritique—is that they attempt to solve an economic crisis on the level of symbolic capital. They try to save the humanities by redisciplining them and making them mirror various forms amateur inquiry. I describe these approaches as the new enclosures, attempts at returning the humanities to disciplinarity with the hopes that administrative and neoliberal forces will find what we do more palatable. Instead of attempting to appease such forces by being pliant and apolitical, we need a new workerist militancy (daring to be “bad workers” from the point of view of neoliberal managerial rhetorics) to combat the economic crisis produced by neoliberalism. Meanwhile, on the level of knowledge production, the humanities need to resist the demand to shrink the scope of their inquiry to the disciplinary. The humanities, at their best, have been interdisciplinary. They have foregrounded both the subject of the human and all the complex forces that shape, limit, and exist in relationship and contradiction with the human. The essay concludes by arguing that the humanities, to resist neoliberal symbolic logics, need to embrace both a critical humanism, and the crucial challenges to this humanism that go by the name of antihumanism and posthumanism. It is only by putting these three discourses in negative dialectical tension with each other that we can begin to imagine a reinvigorated humanities that can address the challenges of the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals When Earth Matters: Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 448-455
Author(s):  
Gerd Bayer
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Agricultural Revolution ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract This essay discusses Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather from an ecocritical perspective, asking how her late 1960s’ novel already anticipated some of the politics of early twenty-first-century environmental thinking in the postcolonial sphere. The alliance of various marginalized characters who, one way or another, violate against existing hegemonic structures replaces the ideological and cultural conflict over territory, which derived directly from the colonialist past, with an agricultural revolution that aims to empower those who most closely resemble the subaltern classes variously theorized in postcolonial theory. This re-turn to the physical or even Real, to the materiality of the earth, opens up an alternative to the cultural essentialism that, from its beginning, created numerous stumbling stones on the path towards decolonization. Through its turn towards farming and the land and away from cultural forms of hegemony, the novel emphasizes the materiality of reality.

“WHERE HEAVES THE TURF”: THOMAS HARDY AND THE BOUNDARIES OF THE EARTH

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Robson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Twenty First Century

WHAT DO WE EXPECTto learn when we scrutinize the boundaries of, or within, Victorian literary studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Because many nineteenth-century scholars had always worked within an interdisciplinary paradigm, the theoretical shifts of the last thirty years or so, which broke down divisions between generically distinct discourses, could be said to have brought continuity, rather than change, to this particular community. Yet it is probably true that a pre-existing predilection for historicist investigation has gained added strength in Victorianist circles in recent times. Certain kinds of journeys have become especially common: intrepid explorers travel beyond the bounds of a literary text to hitherto unimagined contexts, and then return to said text laden with the spoils of their expeditions. The exotic voyage to discover the strangeness of the Victorians, then, has become a familiar event; we have witnessed an expansion of the empire of possible connections. Rarer than these heroic ventures, however, has been the practice of quiet contemplation: we have perhaps been less adept at standing still, and looking carefully at the ground we already hold, the ground we assume we share with our nineteenth-century predecessors. What happens when we eschew the temptation to strike out across new territory, and turn our eyes merely to the earth below? Might we discover boundaries between the Victorians and ourselves in the most mundane, the most fundamental of places?

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