Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics

by Salar Mameni

Overview

In Terracene Salar Mameni historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror. Mameni theorizes the Terracene as an epoch marked by a convergence of racialized militarism and environmental destruction. Both the Anthropocene and the war on terror centered the antagonist figures of the Anthropos and the terrorist as responsible for epochal changes in the new geological and geopolitical world orders. In response, Mameni shows how the Terracene requires radically new engagements with terra (the earth), whose intelligence resides in matters such as oil and phenomena like earthquakes and fires. Drawing on the work of artists whose practices interrogate histories of settler-colonial and imperial interests in land and resources in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Kuwait, Syria, Palestine, and other regions most affected by the war on terror, Mameni offers speculative paths into the aesthetics of the Terracene.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478027041
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/04/2023
Series:	ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	47 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Salar Mameni is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Creation Story  1
Part 1. Terracene  11
1. Terror and the Anthropocene  13
2. Anti-Colonial Critique of the Anthropocene  22
3. Provincializing the Anthropocene; or, Why Artists, Feminists, and Yemeni People Have Much to Say about the Cosmos  27
4. The Anthropocene Is a Work of Art  40
5. The Terracene  46
6. Sensing the Terracene  51
7. Crude Aesthetics  70
Part 2. The Sounds of Terracene  81
8. The Class Shattered at My Feet  83
9. Listening to the Terracene  85
10. Shelter  104
11. Silence  106
Part 3. Terran Deities: Oil, Fires, Fevers  111
12. Lamassu  113
13. Huma  126
14. Homa
15. Pazuzu  134
Part 4. Narrative Terrorism  141
16. The Red Star  143
17. Narrative Terrorism  146
Part 5. Crude Aesthetics  161
18. Texas Crude  163
19. A Fire!  171
20. The Devil's Excrement  185
Acknowledgments  189
Notes  193
Bibliography  211
Index  223
 

Editorial Reviews

In compelling visual analysis, Salar Mameni shows us how the colonial construction of terror has violently homed in on racialized bodies and environments. Through an aesthetics of revolt forged in opposition to the pincer movement of the inhumane-inhuman, Mameni confronts the weaponization of environments in their narrativization.

A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None - Kathryn Yusoff

An innovative, timely, and eminently teachable book, Terracene is part of an exciting new wave of new materialist thought that challenges speciesism, decenters the human, and destabilizes the category of the human altogether. Salar Mameni writes beautifully, weaving memoir and personal vignettes with deep theorizing that demonstrates bright flashes of genius throughout. They bring together the best of critical race, Indigenous, and postcolonial scholarship to bear on the dystopian here and now of climate chaos and terrorized world-making. In short, Terracene is a sensation.

Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War - Ronak K. Kapadia