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  • Ecocomplicity and the Logic of Settler-Colonial Environmentalism
  • Chris Malcolm (bio)

In this essay, I argue that prominent contemporary environmental humanities texts are beset by a series of anxieties. For the ecocritics, activists, citizens, and visual artists I consider here, reflection on contemporary climate crises and the periodization known as the Anthropocene results in feelings of stress, guilt, and discomfort that require management and resolution.1 Confronted with the passing of climate limits, on the one hand, and the differential distribution of histories of environmental racism and injustice, on the other, these texts hold to an impoverished kind of "climate realism," one marked by pragmatism, acceptance, and complicity. In A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Kathryn Yusoff has shown how the subject of the Anthropocene is folded into the production of its racial origins, which continue into the present: "Anthropocenic discourse enacts a foundational global inscription of race in the conception of humanity that is put forth as an object of concern in the Anthropocene."2 For Yusoff, the Anthropocene is better understood as a material process of racialization that "belongs to a material categorization of the division of matter (corporeal and mineralogical) into active and inert."3 The discourse of the Anthropocene and its strategy to "geologiz[e] the social and socializ[e] the geologic," she writes, demands a consideration of how certain "modes of subjectivity are established as categories of extraction" and how others are positioned as historical beneficiaries of such processes.4 For the work that I consider here, what to do with the inheritance of this history amid imminent climate breakdown results in a particular kind of performance, what I term ecocomplicity.

The thinkers I focus on interpret the material histories of the [End Page 106] Anthropocene and their present effects as a demand to acknowledge complicity and accept one's position within them. What I will show is that this leads to a parallel interest in accepting as viable the current parameters of social reality itself. They thereby engage in an aesthetic flattening of historicity. While ecocomplicity reflects a desire to come to terms with contemporary environmental problems, in Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's terms, it is also motivated by an attempt to protect more unsettling experiences that have no obvious solution. "Decolonization," they write, "unsettles everyone."5 As a result, the discourse of ecocomplicity, at times unconsciously, attempts to manage and even justify the ongoing character of racial and colonial antagonisms. I'll refer throughout to the defensive maneuvers that arise when confronting environmental injustice and racism, problems that Yusoff argues the idea of the Anthropocene implicitly references, as defining ecocomplicity.

In Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Elizabeth Povinelli suggests that contemporary anxiety over extinction and climate crises reveals a concern that exceeds the biopolitical problematic of life versus death. She argues that the operation of biopower has long been secondary to a more profound distinction indicated by her term "geontopower"—that is, of life versus nonlife, characterized by "the difference between the lively and the inert."6 Her work attempts to find a critical language "for the moment in which a form of power long self-evident in certain regimes of settler late liberalism is becoming visible globally."7 "Perhaps," she writes, "the Anthropocene and climate change has made geontopower visible to people who were previously unaffected by it."8 Such a realization creates a problem for the texts I cover because it names the period designated by the Anthropocene as one of racial and ecological violence and because it threatens the humanist assumption that "all existents are endowed with the qualities associated with Life."9 Yusoff has commented on Povinelli's argument to highlight the fact that "the restriction of existence to the sequential problems of birth, growth, reproduction, and death" is in fact made meaningful, and therefore racialized, "by way of a sharp contrast with the inanimate geos."10 It is the anxiety and guilt that this scene induces that the discourse of ecocomplicity intervenes in and attempts to manage.

In the context of my argument, Yusoff's and Povinelli's texts help to [End Page 107] show that contemporary environmental thinking operates in relation to a material...

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