A Sharpening of the Already Present: Five Analytical Vignettes on Apocalypse, Hope, Death, and Life
Symposium:
Presentation Title:
- A Sharpening of the Already Present: Five Analytical Vignettes on Apocalypse, Hope, Death, and Life
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
This talk, organized around five analytical vignettes, explores an Indigenous analytical approach to understanding the concept of the ‘Anthropocene,’ including why the present era is not quite everyone’s apocalypse: some Peoples are already post-apocalyptic survivors. In addition to drawing on Indigenous scholarship, two compatible ideas drawn from other decolonial and ‘multispecies’ literatures, ‘radical hope’ and ‘biocultural hope’ respectively, are offered as alternative foundational concepts to counter settler-colonial ideological responses to the current environmental crisis and to the denied/impending fall of US empire. Building from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous materialist critiques of human/animal divides and hierarchies of life, TallBear suggests that the concept of ‘genocide’ must be expanded to include other-than-humans whose lives and deaths are co-constitutive with human lives and deaths. Finally, TallBear examines the relationship between ‘life’ and ‘death,’ gluttonous lives and bad deaths
