After the end of the world? Rethinking temporalities of critique and affirmation in the Anthropocene

Abstract

The contemporary era of the Anthropocene has undermined linear views of progress and development. In its wake, alternative futural imaginaries have become central to critical and decolonial accounts in the discipline of International Relations. We argue that radical imaginaries of alternative non-modern futures risk failing to account fully for the ongoing violence and exclusions of modernity. We identify two strands of Anthropocene work: firstly, the critique posed by ‘posthuman’ ontologies of relation and entanglement, seeking new modes of governance in the face of climate catastrophe; secondly, decolonial affirmative ways of being, drawn from the experiences of the dispossessed in modernity. Both these approaches to futurity seek to move beyond a modernist world to new futures. In our argument, we set out an alternative perspective, the Black Horizon, which rejects the call to imagine new productive futures, and instead focusses on the deconstruction of modernity, in search of ending the current world of antiblackness, rather than critique or affirm its existence. Thus, even though contemporary critical and decolonial approaches stress the attention to ontology, alterity and difference, in their attempts to ground alternative worlds in existing practices or knowledges, they offer salvific alternatives, whilst leaving the foundations of our current world intact.