After Extinction
Publication Year: 2018
A multidisciplinary exploration of extinction and what comes next
What comes after extinction? Including both prominent and unusual voices in current debates around the Anthropocene, this collection asks authors from diverse backgrounds to address this question. After Extinction looks at the future of humans and nonhumans, exploring how the scale of risk posed by extinction has changed in light of the accelerated networks of the twenty-first century. The collection considers extinction as a cultural, artistic, and media event as well as a biological one. The authors treat extinction in relation to a variety of topics, including disability, human exceptionalism, science-fiction understandings of time and posthistory, photography, the contemporary ecological crisis, the California Condor, systemic racism, Native American traditions, and capitalism.
From discussions of the anticipated sixth extinction to the status of writing, theory, and philosophy after extinction, the contributions of this volume are insightful and innovative, timely and thought provoking.
Contributors: Daryl Baldwin, Miami U; Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State U; William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins U; Ashley Dawson, CUNY Graduate Center; Joseph Masco, U of Chicago; Nicholas Mirzoeff, New York U; Margaret Noodin, U of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Bernard C. Perley, U of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Cary Wolfe, Rice U; Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths, U of London.
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Cover
Introduction
Richard Grusin
This volume marks the conclusion of an informal trilogy of books that culminates my initial five-year tenure as director of the Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Like the preceding two volumes—The Nonhuman Turn and Anthropocene...
1. Extinction Events and Entangled Humanism
William E. Connolly
Human exceptionalism, consummate knowledge in principle, capitalist and communist mastery over nature, belonging to a beneficent world, cultural internalism, sociocentrism—all these contending world pictures demand revision today. What is wrong with them...
2. Planetary Memories: After Extinction, the Imagined Future
Jussi Parikka
In the Guardian-organized live chat in November 2014, the science fiction author William Gibson is asked the rather blunt question by one of the web participants, “When does the future begin?” One could easily become sarcastic at such a broad question, but Gibson refrains from...
3. Photography after Extinction
Joanna Zylinska
This chapter takes the horizon of extinction as a reference point against which I will think the ontology of photography and its agency. In the argument that follows, I will explore what photography can do with and to the world, what it can cast light on, and what the role of light is in approaching...
4. The Six Extinctions: Visualizing Planetary Ecological Crisis Today
Joseph Masco
The emerging environmental damage of the industrial age offers up rebounding visions of ecological calamity in the twenty-first century. These dangers are not new but rather have been built slowly over decades of human industry, created in the paradoxical pursuit of security, energy, and...
5. Condors at the End of the World
Cary Wolfe
What kind of event is extinction? To answer that question, we have to begin with an assertion that will seem paradoxical to some and commonsensical to others: that extinction is both the most natural thing in the world and, at the same time, is never and never could be natural. On...
6. It’s Not the Anthropocene, It’s the White Supremacy Scene; or, The Geological Color Line
Nicholas Mirzoeff
This essay is by way of a provocation and an opening to a broader discussion. It is the result of asking, What does it mean to say #BlackLivesMatter in the context of the Anthropocene? As is now common knowledge, the Anthropocene is the proposed name for a new geological era, the “recent...
7. Lives Worth Living: Extinction, Persons, Disability
Claire Colebrook
What is the relationship between extinction and disability? One of the ways in which we might think about disability and disability studies is as requiring an expansion of conditions of justice; this is how Martha Nussbaum has criticized the liberal tradition of fairness and personhood...
8. Biocapitalism and De-extinction
Ashley Dawson
A snow leopard roamed down the face of the Empire State Building. A beautiful, charismatic endangered animal, it was followed by a dazzling Kaiser’s spotted newt, a type of salamander indigenous to Iran. The animals were projected onto the side of New York City’s iconic skyscraper...
9. Surviving the Sixth Extinction: American Indian Strategies for Life in the New World
Daryl Baldwin, Margaret Noodin, and Bernard C. Perley
Is there life after extinction? The authors of this chapter argue yes. At first glance, the assertion that “there is life after extinction” seems trivial because some species have survived earlier mass extinctions. Humans are the beneficiaries of earlier extinctions. Yet, today, new anxieties regarding...
Acknowledgments
This volume, like the two preceding it, is based on one of the annual spring conferences of the Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM). The topic of the 2015 conference (and this volume), “After Extinction,” grew out of C21’s annual...
E-ISBN-13: 9781452956312
E-ISBN-10: 1452956316
Print-ISBN-13: 9781517902896
Page Count: 272
Illustrations:
Publication Year: 2018
OCLC Number: 1030992937
MUSE Marc Record: Download for After Extinction
