Amitov Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
It’s important to note as well that warming is distributed unevenly around the globe: two degrees for some will be four degrees or more for others. See, for example, Forensic Architecture’s investigations of “Climate Crimes” and proposals for a “forensic climatology.” See ➝.
For more on the long history and recent examples, see Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, eds. Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell (New York: OR Books, 2012); and Disobedient Objects, eds. Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon (London: V&A Publishing, 2014).
Or as Elizabeth A. Povinelli notes in “What Do White People Want?: Interest, Desire, and Affect in Late Liberalism,” “The global expansion of explosive affect is intensified by the simultaneous expansion of the individual via social media and the tight restriction of the same individual in terms of her imaginary socioeconomic future,” ➝.
See Andrea Fraser, “L’1% C’est Moi,” Texte zur Kunst (August 2011); Hito Steyerl, “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-democracy,” e-flux no. 21 (December 2010), ➝.
Ibid., Ghosh, 9.
One limitation of Ghosh’s book is that he doesn’t consider sci-fi—such as the writings of Margaret Atwood, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville—as not only part, but leading examples of “serious fiction.” That said he’s clearly holding the conventional literary institutions that maintain such genre divisions to account.
See Jason W. Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016); and T. J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Berlin: Sternberg Press, forthcoming).
The pipeline, if completed, would transfer 570,000 barrels of crude oil daily from North Dakota to Illinois, connecting fracking wells from Bakken Shale to refineries in the Midwest.
Winona LaDuke, “The Dakota Access Pipeline: What Would Sitting Bull Do?,” Ecowatch (August 30, 2016), ➝.
See, for instance, Just Seeds collective’s portfolio of graphics dedicated to Standing Rock and #NoDAPL, ➝.
Cited in Carolina A. Miranda, “The artist who made protesters' mirrored shields says the 'struggle porn' media miss point of Standing Rock,” Los Angeles Times (January 12, 2017), ➝.
Robin Wall Kimmerer and Kathleen Dean Moore, “The white horse and the humvees—Standing Rock is offering us a choice,” Nation of Change (November 7, 2016), ➝; for more on water politics and Standing Rock, see Divided Films, Mni Wiconi: The Stand at Standing Rock, 2016, ➝; and for a wider background, see the Standing Rock Syllabus, ➝.
Standing Rock, in this regard, enacted the decolonization of water at the very moment of its threatened privatization, and not surprisingly, with Trump’s recent declaration to approve further work on the pipeline, the movement has shifted to an international divestment campaign, to date removing more than $55 million from the leading financial institutions funding the DAPL construction (in fact Seattle’s Affordable Housing, Neighborhoods and Finance Committee just voted to divest $3 billion from Wells Fargo, one the project’s leading financiers). Frances Madeson, “Defund DAPL Spreads Across Indian Country as Tribes Divest,” Yes! Magazine (February 02, 2017), ➝.
See Kyle Powys Whyte, “The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice, and U.S. Colonialism,” Red Ink: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities (January/February 2017): “Indeed, the ceremonies at the #NoDAPL camps, expressions such as ‘water is life,’ the sacredness of the Black Hills, the leadership of women, and the many other moral claims about plants, animals, and ecosystems that protectors are making arise from the time-tested knowledges of Dakota and Lakota governance systems that preexist U.S. settlement”; and Nick Estes, “Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context,” The Red Nation (September 18, 2016), ➝.
Mel Evans, Artwash: Big Oil and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
David Graeber, “Direct Action, Anarchism, Direct Democracy,” in Direct Action: An Ethnography (Oakland: AK Press, 2009): 203.
Examples include Liberate Tate’s Human Cost (2011), the presentation of a human body soaked in an oil-like substance in a Tate Britain gallery so as to signify the biopolitical costs of petrocapitalism’s externalities; Hidden Figures (2014), the group’s collective gatherings around a giant black square of cloth allegorizing and contesting Tate’s bureaucratic and financial opacity; BP or Not BP’s guerilla theater performance of counter-BP publicity without permission before unsuspecting audiences at London’s Royal Shakespeare Theater and the British Museum; and a coalition of groups including Liberate Tate and Not an Alternative arranging an oil spill intervention at the Louvre to challenge the flagship museum’s sponsorship arrangements with oil multinationals Total and Eni at the time of COP 21’s meeting in Paris.
Jodi Dean, “The Anamorphic Politics of Climate Change,” e-flux Journal #69 (January 2016), ➝.
Liberate Tate, “Confronting the Institution in Performance: Liberate Tate’s Hidden Figures,” Performance Research 20/4 (2015), 83; they cite Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013) and Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002).
Not an Alternative, “Institutional Liberation,” e-flux Journal #77 (November 2016), ➝.
Mauvaise Troupe Collective, Defending the Zad (2015), ➝.
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Allen Lane, 2014), 294–95.
Ibid., Mauvaise Troupe Collective, 20.
See Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel and Patrick McCurdy, Protest Camps (London: Zed Books, 2013); Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (London: Verso, 2016); and Ibid., Flood and Grindon.
Ibid., Legall; and The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2009).
Ibid., Mauvaise Troupe Collective, 20.
Thanks to the Otolith Group for the term “past potential futures.”
Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
See the pro-geoengineering position of Stewart Brand et al, “An Ecomodernist Manifesto” (April 2015), ➝; and for a counter-position, Ibid., Demos.
See Ibid., Boyd and Mitchell, to which Jordan was a contributor; the work of the late Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Ropley, England: O Books, 2009); and Richard Smith, Green Capitalism: The God that Failed (London: College Publications, 2016).
Stephen Spratt, Andrew Simms, Eva Neitzert, and Josh Ryan-Collins, The Great Transition: A Tale of How It Turned Out Right (London: New Economics Foundation, 2010), ➝; “The Leap Manifesto,” issued by a broad coalition of Canadian authors, artists, national leaders and activists in September 2015, ➝; and the eco-socialist coalition System Change Not Climate Change, ➝.