Anthropocene Unseen

Anthropocene Unseen PDF Author: Cymene Howe
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1950192555
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
The idea of the Anthropocene often generates an overwhelming sense of abjection or apathy. It occupies the imagination as a set of circumstances that counterpose individual human actors against ungraspable scales and impossible odds. There is much at stake in how we understand the implications of this planetary imagination, and how to plot paths from this present to other less troubling futures. With Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, the editors aim at a resource helpful for this task: a catalog of ways to pluralize and radicalize our picture of the Anthropocene, to make it speak more effectively to a wider range of contemporary human societies and circumstances. Organized as a lexicon for troubled times, each entry in this book recognizes the gravity of the global forecasts that invest the present with its widespread air of crisis, urgency, and apocalyptic possibility. Each also finds value in smaller scales of analysis, capturing the magnitude of an epoch in the unique resonances afforded by a single word. The Holocene may have been the age in which we learned our letters, but we are faced now with circumstances that demand more experimental plasticity. Alternative ways of perceiving a moment can bring a halt to habitual action, opening a space for slantwise movements through the shock of the unexpected. Each small essay in this lexicon is meant to do just this, drawing from anthropology, literary studies, artistic practice, and other humanistic endeavors to open up the range of possible action by contributing some other concrete way of seeing the present. Each entry proposes a different way of conceiving this Earth from some grounded place, always in a manner that aims to provoke a different imagination of the Anthropocene as a whole. The Anthropocene is a world-engulfing concept, drawing every thing and being imaginable into its purview, both in terms of geographic scale and temporal duration. Pronouncing an epoch in our own name may seem the ultimate act of apex species self-aggrandizement, a picture of the world as dominated by ourselves. Can we learn new ways of being in the face of this challenge, approaching the transmogrification of the ecosphere in a spirit of experimentation rather than catastrophic risk and existential dismay? This lexicon is meant as a site to imagine and explore what human beings can do differently with this time, and with its sense of peril. Cymene Howe is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and founding faculty of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS) at Rice University. She is the author of Intimate Activism (Duke, 2013) and Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke, 2019). Cymene was co-editor for the journal Cultural Anthropology and the Johns Hopkins Guide to Social Theory, and she co-hosts the weekly Cultures of Energy podcast. Anand Pandian is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation (Duke, 2015) and Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (Duke, 2009), among other book, as well as the co-editor of Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference (Duke, 2003) and Crumpled Paper Boat (Duke, 2017).

Anthropocene Unseen

Anthropocene Unseen PDF Author: Cymene Howe
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1950192555
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 546

Get Book Here

Book Description
The idea of the Anthropocene often generates an overwhelming sense of abjection or apathy. It occupies the imagination as a set of circumstances that counterpose individual human actors against ungraspable scales and impossible odds. There is much at stake in how we understand the implications of this planetary imagination, and how to plot paths from this present to other less troubling futures. With Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, the editors aim at a resource helpful for this task: a catalog of ways to pluralize and radicalize our picture of the Anthropocene, to make it speak more effectively to a wider range of contemporary human societies and circumstances. Organized as a lexicon for troubled times, each entry in this book recognizes the gravity of the global forecasts that invest the present with its widespread air of crisis, urgency, and apocalyptic possibility. Each also finds value in smaller scales of analysis, capturing the magnitude of an epoch in the unique resonances afforded by a single word. The Holocene may have been the age in which we learned our letters, but we are faced now with circumstances that demand more experimental plasticity. Alternative ways of perceiving a moment can bring a halt to habitual action, opening a space for slantwise movements through the shock of the unexpected. Each small essay in this lexicon is meant to do just this, drawing from anthropology, literary studies, artistic practice, and other humanistic endeavors to open up the range of possible action by contributing some other concrete way of seeing the present. Each entry proposes a different way of conceiving this Earth from some grounded place, always in a manner that aims to provoke a different imagination of the Anthropocene as a whole. The Anthropocene is a world-engulfing concept, drawing every thing and being imaginable into its purview, both in terms of geographic scale and temporal duration. Pronouncing an epoch in our own name may seem the ultimate act of apex species self-aggrandizement, a picture of the world as dominated by ourselves. Can we learn new ways of being in the face of this challenge, approaching the transmogrification of the ecosphere in a spirit of experimentation rather than catastrophic risk and existential dismay? This lexicon is meant as a site to imagine and explore what human beings can do differently with this time, and with its sense of peril. Cymene Howe is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and founding faculty of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS) at Rice University. She is the author of Intimate Activism (Duke, 2013) and Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke, 2019). Cymene was co-editor for the journal Cultural Anthropology and the Johns Hopkins Guide to Social Theory, and she co-hosts the weekly Cultures of Energy podcast. Anand Pandian is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation (Duke, 2015) and Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (Duke, 2009), among other book, as well as the co-editor of Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference (Duke, 2003) and Crumpled Paper Boat (Duke, 2017).

Unseen Lives

Unseen Lives PDF Author: Kate Garbers
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
ISBN: 1785926365
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
'...a fully grown man utterly broken by what he had experienced, physically and mentally exhausted with physical evidence showing the overt signs of the abuse he had been through.' This is how Kate Garbers met Riso, a man who had been trafficked and in forced labour for months, with no way out. Modern slavery is far closer than we think. Yet it is largely unseen and unknown to most of us - a crime against humanity hidden in plain sight. In this revealing exposé, Kate Garbers shares moving stories of survivors she has met and shares insights she has gained through over a decade of anti-slavery work. Survivor stories are complemented by a forensic account of how modern slavery works and the many forms it can take - from forced labour to organ harvesting - and how it is enabled to continue by our current laws and systems. Unseen Lives also provides a vision of hope for those looking to challenge and dismantle modern slavery, laying out what changes we need to make as individuals and as a society in order to effectively tackle modern slavery and improve the support of survivors.

Trouble of the World

Trouble of the World PDF Author: Zach Sell
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660466
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
In this innovative new study, Zach Sell returns to the explosive era of capitalist crisis, upheaval, and warfare between emancipation in the British Empire and Black emancipation in the United States. In this age of global capital, U.S. slavery exploded to a vastness hitherto unseen, propelled forward by the outrush of slavery-produced commodities to Britain, continental Europe, and beyond. As slavery-produced commodities poured out of the United States, U.S. slaveholders transformed their profits into slavery expansion. Ranging from colonial India to Australia and Belize, Sell's examination further reveals how U.S. slavery provided not only the raw material for Britain's explosive manufacturing growth but also inspired new hallucinatory imperial visions of colonial domination that took root on a global scale. What emerges is a tale of a system too powerful and too profitable to end, even after emancipation; it is the story of how slavery's influence survived emancipation, infusing empire and capitalism to this day.

The Resonance of Unseen Things

The Resonance of Unseen Things PDF Author: Susan Lepselter
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472052942
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
An interdisciplinary study of how conspiracy theories and stories persist and resonate among different Americans

A Hope in the Unseen

A Hope in the Unseen PDF Author: Ron Suskind
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307763080
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
The inspiring, true coming-of-age story of a ferociously determined young man who, armed only with his intellect and his willpower, fights his way out of despair. In 1993, Cedric Jennings was a bright and ferociously determined honor student at Ballou, a high school in one of Washington D.C.’s most dangerous neighborhoods, where the dropout rate was well into double digits and just 80 students out of more than 1,350 boasted an average of B or better. At Ballou, Cedric had almost no friends. He ate lunch in a classroom most days, plowing through the extra work he asked for, knowing that he was really competing with kids from other, harder schools. Cedric Jennings’s driving ambition—which was fully supported by his forceful mother—was to attend a top college. In September 1995, after years of near superhuman dedication, he realized that ambition when he began as a freshman at Brown University. But he didn't leave his struggles behind. He found himself unprepared for college: he struggled to master classwork and fit in with the white upper-class students. Having traveled too far to turn back, Cedric was left to rely on his intelligence and his determination to maintain hope in the unseen—a future of acceptance and reward. In this updated edition, A Hope in the Unseen chronicles Cedric’s odyssey during his last two years of high school, follows him through his difficult first year at Brown, and tells the story of his subsequent successes in college and the world of work. Eye-opening, sometimes humorous, and often deeply moving, A Hope in the Unseen weaves a crucial new thread into the rich and ongoing narrative of the American experience.

A Slave No More

A Slave No More PDF Author: David W. Blight
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156034517
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Shares the stories of Wallace Turnage and John Washington, former slaves who, in the midst of chaos during the Civil War, escaped to the North and lived to tell about their experiences.

A Question of Freedom

A Question of Freedom PDF Author: William G. Thomas
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300256272
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
The story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George’s County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation’s capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. A Question of Freedom asks us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.

The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin

The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin PDF Author: Derek Peterson
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 379138645X
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This trove of recently discovered photographs offers an unprecedented opportunity to take a closer look at Idi Amin's dictatorship and its impact on Ugandan history. Chosen from a collection of 70,000 negatives from the archive of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, the images in this remarkable collection were taken by Amin's personal photographers between the 1950s and mid-1980s. Like many dictators, Amin used photography as a means of spreading propaganda that would flatter his regime while obscuring its failures and abuses. Organized into thematic sections, these photographs show how Amin sought to gain support for acts such as his expulsion of tens of thousands of South Asians in 1972 and for the "Economic War," in which citizens charged with petty theft were tried and executed. There are also fascinating insights into the ways Amin hoped to promote Ugandan arts and culture, including a food-eating competition in Kampala and ceremonial visits to remote villages. The book includes revelatory archival documents recently unearthed concerning the Amin government. Essays by the authors, both experts in the field, help provide a context for the archive, as well as insights into how the lessons learned from this dark period of African history can shine a light towards a brighter future for Uganda and its people.

The Nutmeg's Curse

The Nutmeg's Curse PDF Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226823954
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism’s violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment. A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning. Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces.

Black Rice

Black Rice PDF Author: Judith A. Carney
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674029216
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Few Americans identify slavery with the cultivation of rice, yet rice was a major plantation crop during the first three centuries of settlement in the Americas. Rice accompanied African slaves across the Middle Passage throughout the New World to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. By the middle of the eighteenth century, rice plantations in South Carolina and the black slaves who worked them had created one of the most profitable economies in the world. Black Rice tells the story of the true provenance of rice in the Americas. It establishes, through agricultural and historical evidence, the vital significance of rice in West African society for a millennium before Europeans arrived and the slave trade began. The standard belief that Europeans introduced rice to West Africa and then brought the knowledge of its cultivation to the Americas is a fundamental fallacy, one which succeeds in effacing the origins of the crop and the role of Africans and African-American slaves in transferring the seed, the cultivation skills, and the cultural practices necessary for establishing it in the New World. In this vivid interpretation of rice and slaves in the Atlantic world, Judith Carney reveals how racism has shaped our historical memory and neglected this critical African contribution to the making of the Americas.