Mark Jackson

This short response replies to critiques of my Annals article on decolonizing the Anthropocene (Jackson 2021 Jackson, M. 2021. On decolonizing the Anthropocene: Disobedience via plural constitutions. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111 (3):698–708. doi: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1779645. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] ). My response to my critical interlocutors locates differences in the politics of inclusion, plurality, and diversity between perspectives aligning themselves with decoloniality and earth systems governance. I argue that there are, in fact, constitutive differences between our respective positions. These do not preclude bridges to dialogue and understanding.

This article mobilizes a decolonial critique of the Anthropocene. It argues for a certain epistemic disobedience to what, conceptually and politically, the Anthropocene seeks to legitimate. The article counterposes recent critical and global governance epistemologies, which summon the Anthropocene as a new humanist and statist moment for universal politics, against plural, parochial forms of relational, nonstatist affirmation. Hegemonic governance imaginaries that invoke universalist and naturalizing rationales are shown to reproduce colonial logics. The article argues for marginalized and systematically ignored forms of earthbound relationality that evidence long-standing political and ontological means for responding to modernity’s ecological and social harms. Earthbound and rooted life worlds can affirm ecological responsibility and coconstitution otherwise. Two examples are presented: one from Afro-Caribbean geographies and another from Anishinaabe legal scholarship. Together they evidence enduring ecological reciprocities that unsettle and refuse the totalizing rationalities invoked by Anthropocene horizons.

This article explores the impact of a century of cultural trauma and marginalisation on the shaping of modern Iraqi Assyrians’ identity and their present-day experiences, including their decisions and sense of belonging to their homeland. Using questionnaire and interview data, we explore how Assyrians who participated in this study respond to a century of persecution during and since WWI, and discuss their current situation in relation to their ethnic and cultural rights in Iraq. Based on data collected from Iraqi Assyrians who reside in various geographical places, we argue that these Assyrians still see themselves on the receiving end of ongoing marginalisation which has long precedents and has not only become part of their identity, but continues to shape their present-day experiences and decisions about where to settle. Nevertheless, we found that historical events have reinforced Assyrians’ ethnic identity and their affiliation with their heritage and religion. The findings are discussed in relation to how cultural trauma shapes a group’s collective identity and experiences.

This article engages the current vogue for addressing the space of the political through aesthetics. It argues that the turn to aesthetics to open up the space of the political risks reproducing particular historical ontologies and metaphysical principles inherent to the concept of aesthetics. These principles interpellate creative energies, expressions, and shared social relationships into forms that are made recognizable by particular historical and European geographical inflections of political legitimacy. As a result, aesthetics and a “politics of aesthetics” actually reproduces the social and political limits it is often invoked to overcome. Instead, the article argues for a need to decolonize the register of the aesthetic, and so assumptions about “the political,” through a more radical attention to ontologies of difference expressed as aesthesis. Drawing from previous work in the field, decolonial and indigenous critiques are mobilized to show how the category of the aesthetic reproduces fundamentally self-limiting frames. The article proceeds by explaining the relevance of attunement to the production of the subject in Kant’s legacy for aesthetic theory. It then situates the limits of the recent attention to geoaesthetics as also invoking metaphysical latencies. A discussion of decolonizing agendas, aesthesis, and indigenous performative critiques of the politics of recognition are briefly explored as specific means to potentially rethink aesthetics as a category. The article ends with a short reflection on the implications of the argument for the sites and geographies of “the political” and the meaning of critique.

The article relates Walter Benjamin’s insights on history and eternal return to modern spaces in colonial and postcolonial Calcutta/Kolkata. Playing on the renaming of the city, the article argues that contemporary social spaces of urban development associated with “Kolkata” return through 18th and 19th century colonial consumption imperatives to dreams once heralded as Calcutta’s fabled “City of Palaces.” Today’s new developments, which claim to bring a “new world” to postcolonial Kolkata, not surprisingly, return historical commodity logics. Spatial multiplicities of contemporary Kolkata/Calcutta reveal, immanent within the claim to the modern, returned social spaces of consumptive repetition, what Benjamin called “the ever-selfsame.” As such, they evidence the dream sleep of modernity—“the newest remaining the same in all its parts”—rather than a continuity of temporal succession, “ages ending and the new stepping out from the old.” Attending to the urban modern through the contemporary (post)colonial cityscape requires that we recast how we define the modern and the modern city. But, we must address, co-terminously, both the embedded colonizing assumptions which continue to shape the ordinary prejudices of the modern, as importantly, the constitutive contradictions, layered practices, and material paradoxes fundamental to differentiating global modernities.

This paper explores a new phenomenon which is assuming global proportions: the planning and construction of artificial islands. Varying in size, shape, and purpose, man-made islands are looming on the horizons of an increasing number of aspiring global cities and regions at the margins of global capitalism. From the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, from the Caribbean to the North Sea, artificial islands are increasingly embraced as spectacular, technical signifiers of global participation and urban economic progress: as the ‘new cultural icons’. Appropriated in different contexts, island projects, however, can be (and are) also resignified. They thus change in form, meaning, and use. While islands have been objects of renewed interest in cultural and historical geography, surprisingly, these new man-made landforms seem to have gone largely unnoticed. This paper suggests a research agenda to engage with artificial islands as a new ‘metageographical’ category of emergent, yet historically resonant, social space.