Sina Steglich

Against the backdrop of the climate crisis and Anthropocene injustices, this conversation unfolds the concept of allochrony to examine modernity as a temporal regime that relied on the attribution of non-simultaneity to the populations of western colonies under the ethnographic gaze of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Positioning the racialized signifier of “the primitive” as a key concept and foil in understanding the articulation of modern subjectivity around 1900, modern temporalities are grounded in the construction of a temporal hierarchy that legitimized the dispossession of land and oppression of Indigenous peoples at the height of European imperialism. Drawing on cultural anthropology, media theory, and the history of science, this conversation provides a critical assessment of the Anthropocene by foregrounding the colonial violence and inherent paradoxes of modern epistemologies as a function of temporal categorization. mehr

Framed by the difficulty of coming to terms with the disruptive temporalities of the climate crisis, the proposition of the Anthropocene invites a critical re-contextualization of modern concepts of time and subjectivity. The declaration of the human as an agent of geological stratification both re-inscribes and challenges the temporal self-image of western modernity as an anthropocentric narrative of progress and ontological supremacy. Establishing a dialogue between historiography and the environmental humanities, this article embeds the Anthropocene hypothesis in recent scholarship on the pluralization of modern temporalities and suggests opportunities to revisit and decenter the specific hegemonic preconceptions and implications of considering modernity and the Anthropocene as temporal regimes with universalist, yet contingent claims on divergent conceptions of being-intime. Contextualized with references to the emergence of historicism in the late 19th century and decolonial critiques that help frame the articulation of western modernity as a practice of temporalized hegemony, this article provides a stepping-stone and introduction to what it might mean to revisit and pluralize modern times against the backdrop of the Anthropocene. mehr

The anthropocene discourse is a fascinating intervention into the current understanding of the human sphere and its environment, stimulating the re-shaping of “natural” as well as disciplinary, epistemological boundaries. But the vivid circulation of this vibrant term seems to hide the fact that the binary of the natural and the cultural sphere is not a recent invention nor is it itself a “natural” differentiation. This article will therefore shed light on its intellectual predecessors and its diachronic depth discussing contributions to European enlightenment historiography around 1800 and their narrowing understanding of “universal history” as human, written history – and as such clearly separated from the history of the earth and other species. Analyzing this crucial episode of modern historiography is of genuine importance: this specific understanding of history as limited to humans has to be regarded as the fundamental epistemological shift separating the two worlds of nature and culture that remains influential until the present day and is currently challenged by the anthropocence discourse. mehr