This Read & Record episode features Zoe Todd’s 2015 article “Indigenizing the Anthropocene”. This article is featured in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment and Epistemology, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin and published through Open Humanities Press in 2015.
In Todd’s article, she insists on an ethical relationality with Indigenous Peoples and philosophies as both a necessary starting point for processes of decolonization, and as a move away from the conditions that created the Anthropocene, including the notion of the Anthropocene itself.
“There is no way to get around the fact that the business of making knowledge and making art in the European and North American academies is still very much a Eurocentric endeavour. But I would offer: An effective art of the Anthropocene is one that directly engages with the structural violences of heteropatriarchy and white supremacy as they shape discourse and praxis. This is where the work of Indigenous scholars and artists promises to speak back, reshape, and change the direction of current human-centric and Eurocentric framings of the Anthropocene. I now attend to the promise of Indigenous praxis and thought as decolonizing tools in the Anthropocene.” (Todd, 2015, 248-249).
The full book is available to download for free online. Open Humanities Press (or OHP) is an international community of scholars, editors and readers with a focus on critical and cultural theory. By partnering with a number of groups and institutions, OHP acts on the principles of access, scholarship, diversity and transparency in order to explore grass-roots solutions to the crisis in Humanities publishing.
Reference: Todd, Z. (2015). Indigenizing the Anthropocene. Pp. 241-254 in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment and Epistemology. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, editors. Open Humanities Press.