social roles and geohistorical places. In this way, both race and the division of labor remained structurally linked and mutually reinforcing, in spite of the fact that neither of them were necessarily dependent on the other in order to exist or change.”23 By establishing race as a biological categorization, Europeans established themselves as superior, and the colonized others as inferior. This allowed them to create epistemologies that represented modernity and positioned the Global North as the Subject. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls this “subjugated knowledge” based on established racial hierarchy “epistemic violence” and voices how this placed Europe as the production center of knowledge and the creator of historical narrative.24 The creation of the colonial other allowed Europeans to paint themselves as the harbingers of modernity to the savages and
“In its brief tenure, the Anthropocene has metamorphosed. It has been taken up in the world, purposed, and put to work as a conceptual grab, materialist history, and cautionary tale of planetary predicament. Equally, this planetary analytic has failed to do the work to properly identify its own histories of colonial earth- writing, to name the masters of broken earths, and to redress the legacy of racialized subjects that geology leaves in its wake.”27
Kathryn Yussoff
and these colonial activities were deemed necessary to civilize the savages. It becomes necessary to question the words modernity and civilization themselves at this point, especially within the discourse of the Anthropocene. If modernity is meant to represent technological advancements or secular thought or philosophy, then these fields were already being discussed in civilizations in India, China, Egypt and other “hubs” before Europe’s settler conquests. If modernity is meant to mean “new” then the civilizing agenda of Europeans should have been rendered obsolete. Anibal Quijano answers this question by claiming that for Europeans, modernity represented coloniality of power.25 Luiza Prado de O. Martins while discussing Anibal Quijano breaks down his concept of coloniality of power as constituted by three fundamental processes–domination, exploitation, conflict–which implicate what he believes are the four major areas of social existence: labour, sexuality, authority and subjectivity.26 Coloniality of power then represents global, total subjugation. It is an attempt to surpass the nature of localized pre-colonial “hubs” and extend European superiority over an interconnected network of colonized others. This global domination imperialist agenda makes the name “Anthropocene” highly problematic, since Eurocentriccis-hetero-patriarchal capitalism has been established as the cause of this phenomenon. It is a product of the curation of the white settler man as the Subject and the black, brown and/ or indigenous person as Object with the aim to globally trade Objects through capitalist means of production. The anthropos then, not only ignores the processes of oppression, extraction and exploitation, but also incriminates the othered colonized for their own dehumanization. Donna Haraway suggests the name Capitalocene–which places the systems of Capitalism and the interconnected white-cis-hetero patriarchy as the destructive catalysts of this age, that render humans, nonhumans and the resources of the planet as resources to be exploited.27
19.Yussoff, 33. 20.Ibid, 34. 21. Ibid, 35. 22.Ibid, 37 23. Anibal Quijano, and Michael Ennis. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533-580. 536. 24. Rosalind C. Morris and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 25.Quijano, 537. 26. Luiza Prado De O. Martins, “Technoecologies of Birth Control: Biopolitics by Design,” LUIZA PRADO DE O. MARTINS, April 2017, https://www.luiza-prado.com/technoecologies. 27. Donna Jeanne Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016) 28. Yussoff, 2.
