Aesthetic paradigms constitute power as they rationalize and legitimize, normalize and naturalize certain ways of seeing and being, knowing and valuing. The term Anthropocene was originally intended as a neutral reference to humanity’s unprecedented and destructive recent ecological, biogeochemical, and geological engagement with the web of life. The titular “Anthropos” has been rightly critiqued for presenting humanity as a homogenized, universal collective agent of ecological destruction. Alternative terms, including Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene, etc., highlight varying causal characteristics, perpetrators, and timelines of emergence. My concept of the Anthroposupremocene is “patchy” and refers to the dominant historically-specific aesthetic paradigm of “Anthropos” as the “Master of Nature.” Anthroposupremacism entails an ontologically-constitutive abjection of the animal from the human, and a negation of the intrinsic value of the more-than-human world, and other-than-human beings and entities. The logic of this radical negation has been widely applied to classify myriad humans relegated to invidious hierarchical, dualist, gendered, and racialized categories of dehumanized “Nature,” and thus coded as “less-than-human.”
The Anthroposupremocene has shaped the modern world through the necropolitical processes of genocidal colonialism and ecocidal capitalism that gave rise to the existentially perilous conditions for which the term “Anthropocene” was created. The titular Anthropos is not a neutral descriptor of a humanity that bears equal, species-level responsibility for the epochal world-breaking of the Earth’s life-support systems that is driving the Sixth Mass Extinction. Rather, Anthropos exemplifies the historically specific universalizing claim to “humanity” that Sylvia Wynter brilliantly characterized as the “overrepresentation of Man,” in which a particular “genre of the human” claims universal supremacy over all other beings. To confront and remediate this damage, which threatens our species and a myriad of other life forms, we urgently need to dismantle this aesthetic paradigm—to “unsettle” the claimed dominion of Anthropos, decolonize relations, make reparations, return stolen lands, and undo Anthrosupremacy together with the systemic racism and misogyny that it subtends. Art offers a space to shatter the doxa of the dominant modality of being human, and imagine and enact non-invidious, non-binary, non-dualist, non-speciesist modes of being human and forge genuinely intersectional multispecies worldmaking solidarities—rejecting the underlying aesthetic paradigm that separates humanity from itself and the natural world, and working together to recuperate, extend, or re-imagine non-toxic visions of how to be human in a more-than-human world organized around principles of mutualism, symbiopoeisis, respect, reparation, reciprocity, “response-ability,” and regeneration.
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Maya KÓVSKAYA (PhD UC Berkeley, 2009) teaches Multispecies Anthropocene Studies; Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS) at Chiang Mai University, after 20 years living in China, and seven years in India as a curator and scholar. Maya has published numerous books and articles on the intersection of the political, cultural, and ecological with contemporary art, performative and visual culture, and the Anthropocene concept, and curated dozens of international contemporary art exhibitions. Maya is the founder and director of the AMOR MUNDI Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab, an intersectional multidisciplinary research initiative in the Global South, investigating how human and more-than-human worldmaking and survival are mutually entangled. Maya’s current theoretical research entails “rethinking the human in a more-than-human world” towards conceptualizing a “politics beyond the human and a multispecies polity;” bio and ecosemiosis; theorizing the etiologies of the “Anthroposupremocene” and the invidious, hierarchical division between humans and the more-than-human world that accompanied the historical, contingent, constitutive species-alienation of Humanist “Man/Anthropos” from the animal-human and “Nature,” and how human worldmaking entailed multispecies worldbreaking and the more-than-human become categorically less-than-human. Maya curated the Natchez Field Station for the HKW-organized “Mississippi. An Anthropocene River” research program (2018-2019), investigating the necropolitical “Anthroposupremocene” in Natchez through linkages between Anthroposupremacism and White supremacism, ecocide and indigenous genocide, chattel slavery and the rise of the plantation model, colonialism and capitalism.
Gonçalo D. SANTOS is an anthropologist and a leading international scholar in the field of China studies. His research explores new approaches to questions of modernity, subjectivity, and social, technological, and ecological transformation in contemporary China. He is an assistant professor of socio-cultural anthropology in the Department of Life Sciences and a Researcher and Group Coordinator in the Research Center for Anthropology and Health (CIAS) at the University of Coimbra. Prior to joining the University of Coimbra in 2020, he held positions at the London School of Economics, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Chinese Village Life Today (University of Washington Press, 2021) and the co-editor of Transforming Patriarchy (University of Washington Press, 2017). His research has been published in leading scientific journals in the fields of anthropology, science and technology studies, and Asian studies. He is a member of the Research Group on Culture and Society, Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, at Georgetown University, and is the founder and the director of Sci-Tech Asia, a transnational research network that focuses on the relations between technoscience, politics, and society in Asia and around the world. He is interested in comparative approaches that draw on Chinese and Asian perspectives and histories to challenge the hegemonic power of Euro-American epistemologies and narratives of modernity.
