Southern Anthropocenes

"Since the Anthropocene was proposed, we have known that while the causes are 'human' we must be freed from the 'Human' to allow for making plural, ways of living and thinking. Southern Anthropocenes does so by creating a plane of consistency for multiplicities. It is an urgently needed collective undertaking."

Déborah Danowski, Professor Emeritus at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

"Written from the archives and territories of a diverse array of ecological situations and struggles, Southern Anthropocenes rekindles our hope in social theory's ability to attune to the stream of life. This acutely present, yet anticipatory volume functions as a collective composition that explicitly seeks out divergence, showing why and how social theory must recommence the active search for portals and contact zones to worlds beyond the modern.

The 'anthropocene variations' within illuminate portals into regenerative ways of worlding emerging from the multiple souths that inhabit the planet."

Arturo Escobar, author of Designs for the Pluriverse (2018), Pluriversal Politics (2020) and Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human (2024, with Michal Osterweil and Kriti Sharma)

"Southern Anthropocenes is the collection of conceptual revisions, perspectival realignments, and theoretical openings that we have all been waiting for! Its authors dismantle the idea of a unitary Anthropocene by taking readers on a rhizomatic journey through strategies of world making and problem solving across the globe, showcasing the myriad modes through which people have exceeded imperial pathways to modernity and humanity, and the innumerable lessons to be absorbed about coping with planetary transformation. By eschewing easy reversals and embracing the idea of pluriversal contact zones, Southern Anthropocenes asks us to reorient both our empirical and analytic gazes to attune ourselves to radical forms of co-existing and relational repair - it is a must read!"

Deborah A. Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, Director, Center for Experimental Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania, USA