Allegories of the Anthropocene

In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of  allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis

The sea is rising: Visualising climate change in the Pacific islands

I begin with our earth island; a concept made possible by the satellite technologies developed in the Cold War; a battle that, while largely invisible to the majority of the people of the globe, was violently propagated on the small atolls and great ocean of the Pacific. The myth of the island isolate, adapted by ecologists and anthropologists alike, helped to justify the detonation of hundreds of thermonuclear weapons in the atolls of the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia. In selecting the atolls for nuclear detonations, the island was treated as metonymic of our terraqueous globe. Blowing up the island was understood in a part-for-whole relationship in which one could make predictions for the destruction and irradiation of the earth. Bravo, a 15- megaton hydrogen weapon that detonated in the Pacific in 1954, might be seen as an originary event for the Anthropocene, in which the human destruction of an island might be scaled up to the earth itself (DeLoughrey, “The Myth”).2 The radiation from Bravo permeated the global atmosphere, creating the world’s first modern ‘environmental refugees’ and catalyzed the field of atmospheric chemistry. Studying the nuclear irradiation of the global atmosphere led directly to the science of the Anthropocene. While the Pacific Islands were used as laboratories and thus were at the vanguard of new technologies of weaponry, high-speed cameras, color film, radiocarbon dating, and developments in ecology, the islands were consistently denied their imbrication with the globe, interpellated as “isolated” and “primitive” in the films and documents of the Atomic Energy Commission (DeLoughrey, “The Myth” 168, 175)

Allegories of the Anthropocene

In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of  allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis

"ISLAND ECOLOGIES AND CARIBBEAN LITERATURES"-super-1

This paper examines the ways in which European colonialism positioned tropical island landscapes outside the trajectories of modernity and history by segregating nature from culture, and it explores how contemporary Caribbean authors have complicated this opposition. By tracing the ways in which island colonisation transplanted and hybridised both peoples and plants, I demonstrate how mainstream scholarship in disciplines as diverse as biogeography, anthropology, history, and literature have neglected to engage with the deep history of island landscapes. I draw upon the literary works of Caribbean writers such as Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Jamaica Kincaid and Olive Senior to explore the relationship between landscape and power. Copyright (c) 2004 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.