Lecture series: "Anthropology, the Anthropocene, and Africa"

Join us for the CARAM Lecture Series, “Anthropology, the Anthropocene, and Africa,” organised by Nick Rahier and Koen Stroeken as part of their new elective MA in African Studies course on the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene names a new geological epoch in which humans have become a dominant planetary force. But the “human” at the centre of this narrative is far from universal. As Kathryn Yusoff reminds us, the Anthropocene’s universal “we” masks the uneven histories through which the category of the human was forged. The very concept is grounded in a geological imagination shaped by empire, extraction, and dispossession that rendered black and indigenous lives the material substrate of planetary transformation while erasing their knowledge, labour, and worlds from its account of “humanity.” Taking this critique seriously, this CARAM lecture series explores how Africanist anthropology can unsettle Eurocentric accounts of the “Anthropos” and reveal multiple, locally grounded Anthropocenes shaped by distinct ecological, historical, and political conditions.