Racial Capitalocene: Françoise Vergès asks “Is the Anthropocene Racial?”

Françoise Vergès is a francophone political scientist, feminist, and historian whose expertise lies within the developing field of postcolonial studies. She holds a dual BA from UC San Diego and a PHD from UC Berkeley, and has published a great number of works in both French and English, which include the essay we read, “Racial Capitalocene: Is the Anthropocene Racial?” published by Verso in the 2017 collection The Futures of Black Radicalism. She has also produced several French documentaries, and often collaborates with artists through the workshop “Cartographie de l’espace postcolonial" (Mapping of Postcolonial Space). Alongside her own scholarship, Vergès has taught as a professor at both the University of Sussex and the Goldsmiths College in the UK. She cites her interest in “racialized environmental politics” as being “partly biographical”: having grown up in the French colonial island of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean within a family of “communist, anticolonial, and feminist” thinkers, Vergès was directly exposed to the way in which “the environment had been shaped by slavery and colonialism.”

In this essay, Vergès states that her goal is to “suggest ways of writing a history of environment that takes into account the history of racial capitalism.” She criticizes the term “Anthropocene” for how it posits all of humanity as “an undifferentiated whole,” and points out how this narrative simplifies not only the problem of climate change, but capitalism as well. Her argument expands on one crucial fact, this being that “slavery and colonialism had a deep impact on the world-ecology,” turning human beings into nothing but labor and nature into land meant to be profited off of. In this, she dates the beginning of what has been called the Capitalocene back to the sixteenth century and the so-called “discovery of the New World.” Here, we see not only the transformation of nature into a cheap resource, but also the division of labor according to a “color line.” This same color line allows for environmental racism to thrive. Vergès refers to he 1987 report Toxic Waste and Race in the United States that found that “race was the single most important factor in determining where toxic waste facilities were sited” in the United States. Vergès makes it clear that despite what we may want to believe about climate change, it is not the result of human hubris in some abstract mythical way, but rather the outcome of a long history of racial capitalism and intentional decisions made for the sake of profit, without any concern for the planet, or waste, or the lives of people of color. Finally, she tries to envision a new radical agenda for the future, one that centers on decolonization and turning to sources such as Afrofuturism in order to envision possible futures other than those the racial Capitalocene has in store for us. Questions about the proper start date of the Anthropocene, as well as whether or not that’s an appropriate name for the epoch, have come up several times in our class discussions. While in the past we argued that these kinds of debates should not be our focus, considering the reality of the climate crisis, this essay allows us to achieve a more complete view of the history of humanity. In doing so, Vergès rejects the term “Anthropocene,” as there are legitimate dangers in using a “catchy term” that does not force us to contend with the violence and inequality inherent in our modern day world. Living in the “Anthropocene,” we may never have to acknowledge that it was enslaved people -- “racialized chattel”-- who served as “the capital that made capitalism.” Without this understanding, it is impossible to even begin to look responsibly towards our future. 

Our class discussion about Vergès’ work makes clear that we largely agree with her assertion that the concept of the Anthropocene acts as an “easy story” that disregards our ecological moment’s roots in colonialism. In asserting that the era should be renamed to something along the lines of the “Racial Capitalocene,” Vergès forces us to reckon with the way in which the “Anthropocene” regards the project of capitalism as one undertaken by the whole of humanity instead of a violent, privileged few. However, there are moments in the essay in which we are forced to question Vergès’ stance on the immediacy of climate change as a global crisis. When discussing dominant Western ideologies addressing climate change, Vergès warns against both the “apocalyptic” narrative of the “human predisposition for destruction” and the “optimistic” narrative of “green capitalism,” both of which “have inspired the current rhetoric of a ‘crisis’.” While she is right to assert that the “crisis” is not produced by human nature nor a derailment of the inherently good project of progress, the end of the article may risk undermining the urgency of the challenges we face. The article’s final moments make reference to Isabelle Stengers’ “skepticism of the probable,” which describes an approach to the Racial Capitalocene that seeks to promote speculative thinking of a “possible” beyond the “optimism” of green capitalism. Vergès suggests that: 

World citizenship and humanism must be brought in as decolonializing alternatives. A curriculum of radical pedagogy for the politics of the possible will challenge all forms of dehumanized work in favor of shared, life-affirmative labor practices, resisting the economy of speed for efficiency and acknowledging that time is needed to nourish knowledge. 

We agree that speculative practices and radical pedagogy are essential if we are to work towards a lasting decolonial future, but we question the time frame required for such practices to take effect. If green capitalism exists only as the most recent permutation of the very system that brought us to this historical moment backed by exploited human bodies, and a radical paradigm shift feels unlikely, how are we to prevent the destruction of innumerable coastal communities? While Vergès’ article serves to provide necessary historical context to the Capitalocene, it has also left us disoriented. How are we to reconcile the violence of speed with the limited time we have to intervene? 

(AL and CS)

Picture Source: https://www.macalester.edu/gallery/pastexhibits/2017-18/iyapo-repository/