When Women Hold the World: Transcript ________________________________________ [Upbeat music 10 seconds to fade] Intro: Denise Burgher Welcome to the inaugural episode of our podcast, “When Women Hold the World.” We are a cross-disciplinary cohort of scholars from the NHC Summer 2024 Podcasting Institute namely: Ananya, Courtney, Debarati, and Denise. In this podcast, we explore the increasingly discussed concept of the Anthropocene through the lenses of a variety of women writers, activists, and other knowledge producers from the Global South. Many of the women’s voices have faded from our public imaginary if they were ever present. Others remain peripheralized with limited uptake. As a group of interdisciplinary scholars with a shared interest in the future of the planet, we urge you to attend to these voices for it is through our willingness to hear the critiques and perspectives of these women that we can find ways to push forward through what promises to be what in truth is already been a very challenging time for everyone on the planet. This episode is the first of a series of 5 episodes as we explore the Anthropocene from the perspectives of varied women writers, artists and cultural artivists from the Global South. Stay tuned. [Music 5 seconds to fade] The Age of the Anthropocene: Denise Burgher Explanation of the concept of the holocene (Denise Burgher continues) Why Should We Care? The age of the Anthropocene broadly refers to the time, to the era, when human beings began to make a marked impact on the major cycles and systems which sustained the natural balance of the Earth. Think globally here. What we're talking about is water cycle, the cycles that make soil productive, the uptake of nitrogen, phosphorus, things that we don't think about, but that have a deep and significant impact on the weather and climate cycles. You see, all of the cycles of the Earth are interdependent. When one is interrupted or tipped out of balance, all the other cycles and their corresponding systems that they govern, the air, the water, the Earth, the sunlight, are affected and they change in response. The stability of all of those systems is needed in order to sustain life on Earth as we know it. Though the Anthropocene appears to be a neutrally descriptive, a scientific term, the conceptualization of the Anthropocene is both gendered and racialized. If the Anthropocene, as it has been, is described as just another age in human time and space like all the other ages, there is a naturalness, an inevitability to its existence. You know, like the age of the dinosaurs. They came and they went. We didn't have anything to do with that. But the destruction that is inherent in the Anthropocene, the extinction events which have defined its tenure, if we see them from this perspective, they become normalized. So the unnatural events which actually triggered the Anthropocene, they're obfuscated, they're shielded somehow in language that shrouds human actions, human actors, and thereby human responsibilities. Now we actually can't talk about the age of the Anthropocene without referring to the age of the Holocene. And this is not that hard, really. The age of the Holocene is just a tandem term which refers to the time immediately before the Anthropocene, during which the major systems of the Earth, including the climate, were in a period of relative calm, which until the end of the Holocene, of course, lasted actually thousands of years. So where are we now, I'm glad you asked. We are not just in the age of the Anthropocene, but we are actively, presently experiencing what scientists call climate departure. Now climate departure is the point at which the Earth's climate is no longer predictable, because it's departed. It's departed from standard records. It's no longer in balance. So this is a new state where heat records are routinely shattered and extreme weather events have become the new normal, because we're in climate departure. Practically, this means it doesn't seem as if it's getting hotter. It is hotter. It doesn't seem as if hurricanes and tornadoes are more frequent. They are. It doesn't seem as if glaciers are disappearing or that sea ice is melting. Those are simply facts. Now, we've been really good at ignoring facts as we pursue our daily lives. We have things to do, children to raise, books to write. But the facts persist nonetheless. Now, why should we, particularly those who are students and scholars of the humanities, care? Well, in addition to the fact that this is the only planet we have, humans bring a necessary perspective, a methodology, if you will, to discourse. In addition to that, we already have ways of teaching and sharing and disseminating information. And we have structures through which to do it. We have students, we have classrooms, we have syllabi, conference halls, and other forums. So humanists are actually really important right now. A brief history of the 19th c. & the rise of the Anthropocene told by Courtney Murphy The nineteenth century heightened the Industrial Age. With the rise of technology, the need for natural and human capital was in higher demand. It is difficult to summarize ALL the ways the Anthropocene solidified during this period, but one of its major markers was the Transatlantic Slave Trade and plantation slavery in the Americas. From the mid-1400s to the late 1860s, Europeans colonized, pillaged, and dispossessed millions of Africans to what they considered the “New World.” Symbiotic ties between the Earth’s humans, land, and animals, as well as natural landscapes that encouraged diverse biomes, were traded for cleared land and manicured plantations that produced sugar, indigo, cotton, rice, and money. Doesn’t this all sound familiar? All of this still resonates today and current scholars are trying to understand: is the anthropocene as a concept enough to understand slavery, the plantation, and its afterlives? From Anthropocene to Plantationcene by Courtney Murray Some like Donna Haraway, Anna L. Tsing, and others argue for terms like the “Plantationcene” that traces our current environmental crisis not at the start of capitalism or modernity but historically from the plantation system, which then merged with current iterations of capitalistic extraction—concretizing the destruction and exploitation of nature and humans. [sounds of winds, bells, and other pastoral sounds in the background] Critique of Anthropocene to Plantationcene (Courtney Murray continues) However, scholars in Black Studies and literature such as Teresa A. Goddu and Janae Davis, and more have criticized how the Anthropocene and Plantationcene, as theoretical concepts, overlook how the enslaved, African diasporic theorists and authors responded to this dehumanization and natural impact. 19th century Black women’s literature’s critiques of the Anthropocene (Courtney Murray continues) Black women's literature from the nineteenth century especially contains sophisticated critiques of the Anthropocene. And this is true for a woman named Hannah Crafts. Born enslaved in antebellum, rural North Carolina, Crafts started writing her unpublished autobiographical novel, The Bondwoman’s Narrative. The novel follows Hannah (her autobiographical protagonist) from plantation to plantation, escapes from these spaces, freedom--all the while recording the everyday happenings of people around her. It is also theoretically attuned to how plantations and slavery artificially cultivate cross-inter-intra species connections like in chapter 16 when she writes: “Isn’t it a strange state to be like them. To shuffle up and down the lanes unfamiliar with the flowers, and in utter darkness as to the meaning of Nature’s various hieroglyphical symbols, so abundant on the trees, the skies, in the leaves of grass, and everywhere. To see people ride in carriages, to hear such names as freedom, heaven, hope and happiness and not to have the least idea how it must seem to ride, any more than what the experience of these blessed names would be. It must be a strange state to be prized just according to the firmness of your joints, the strength of your sinews, and your capability of endurance. To be made to feel that you have no business here, there, or anywhere except just to work—work—work—” [music suggestive of the grinding nature of work in plantations plays in the background] Analysis of Hannah Crafts (Courtney Murray continues) In just these few lines, you find, in a Black woman's 19th century literary text, tenets of ecocriticism and critical race theory that predate concepts like the Anthropocene. Crafts forefronts how they enslaved, their dilapidated quarters, how their bodies have been turned into machines, how slavery and labor have made nature foreign and disposable. Crafts invites us to consider what changes when we recenter Black women like her in ecological theories, praxis, and movements. What can Black women's texts pre-1900 teach us about creating symbiotic and ethical relationships with nature, ourselves, and our bodies today? [gentle music shifts to a strong howl suggesting heightened tension and an atmosphere of peril] Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (by Denise Burgher) In Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, America is reeling from the effects of poverty, lawlessness, and a crisis of accessible education in the context of extreme climate change and corporate greed. Wait a minute, is this book set in the present? Actually, yeah, the book begins in 2024, even though she wrote it in the 90s, so take from that what you will, but let's turn to the text. The central theme of Parable of the Sower can be captured in these words spoken by Lauren Olamina, the protagonist: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change. Now these words are both promise and curse.” The effects of careless and violent change are painfully evident in the text. There's poverty, there's rampant drug addiction and incredible oppression, so much pain and suffering. But even as these facts remain stubbornly true, Olamina insists that the potential for change is as present in death as it is in life. She teaches these truths to the people who become her followers. She's trying deliberately to create a religion, a way of thinking, an ideology, if you will, that will allow them to become. This theory of living in and embracing change made it possible for her followers to find freedom in the broken world of dystopian America where the story is set. This freedom was found through seemingly quotidian actions and choices that gained momentum and built scale becoming a flow, becoming what we would call a movement. Now practically, when it started, the conditions of their lives did not change. In fact, while they were doing this work, people responded to their conditions changed. The actual conditions began to change as the people worked together to create the realities which they sought. So Butler is inviting us to think about change, think about the tenet of change. So if we embrace this tenet of change, if we taught our students about the power of change, if we taught them that everything that we see has been created, that everything that we take for granted, whether from a 40-hour work week to vacation days to health care to the creation of laws and institutions that protect us, everything that we actually experience was created. They're actually being created. What would happen? What if we actually taught labor history in our classrooms, movement histories? What if we shifted the perspective of our pedagogy, of our syllabi, of our reading lists and started to think about the world, think about knowledge production from the perspectives of the people who have suffered the most? That would mean the poor. That would mean people of color. That would mean immigrants. That would mean women. Now, surrounded by the evidence of Butler's dire predictions, writer Adrienne Marie Brown wrote Emergent Strategy, citing Butler as a shaping influence on her work and theorist Grace Lee Boggs as a catalyst, Brown writes, Emergent Strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for. Now, inherent in Brown's theorization is the belief that each of us has the capacity, wherever we are, for change, that it is our ability to recognize this power, latent in all humans, however great, however small, to become the change we want to see by becoming change. So if we pull Butler and Brown into conversation, we are invited to realize that this is not a decontextualized, New Age science fiction-y invitation. No, this theory of change centers the human, celebrates the human, really, and invites a kind of triumphant move from small changes individually to larger changes, both individually and collectively. So this is then a theory of individual and collective empowerment. So what happens if we embrace intentional, liberatory change? What happens if we rigorously begin to apply analysis and justice, for example, to our personal lives? What happens if we become radically honest? What happens if we bring radical justice into our pedagogies? What would happen if we truly embrace change? [music fades in] [sound bite of street protests from India plays as Ananya Ghoshal begins talking] Indian women writers and the Anthropocene by Ananya Ghoshal In terms of a Global South Dialogue, it is indeed an excellent time to recognize how Indian women writers are engaging with Anthropocene. I am Ananya, and would like to discuss Arundhati Roy's outstanding contributions to environmental and Anthropocene literature. Arundhati Roy is a name that resonates with readers around the world. Known for her groundbreaking novel, The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, Roy has also been an outspoken activist and essayist, addressing some of the most pressing social, political, and environmental issues of our time. To begin, let us look at Roy's unique position as both a literary and activist figure. [thumping, thrashings sounds of collective protest in the background] Roy's writing is a tool for social change. Her essays, collected in works such as The Algebra of Infinite Justice and Field Notes on Democracy, often probe the catastrophic impact of globalization, unchecked industrialization, and state policies on the environment and marginalized communities. In this context, one of Roy's most poignant essays on the environment that I remember vividly is The Greater Common Good, where she passionately critiques large dam projects in India. The Narmada Valley Development Project is at the heart of this essay. Dams, often hailed as symbols of progress and development, are dissected through Roy's incisive lens, revealing the ecological destruction and displacement of indigenous communities they entail. She writes, Big dams are to a nation's development what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They are both weapons of mass destruction. This powerful analogy strikes at the core of her argument. The so-called development projects are often catastrophic for the environment and local populations. By revealing the human and the environmental cost of such projects, Roy champions the cause of those who are seldom heard in the mainstream discourse. Transitioning to the broader concept of the Anthropocene, Roy's work delves deep into the crisis that is born from humanity's footprint on earth. In essays like The End of Imagination, Roy articulates the intertwined fate of humanity and the environment, condemning the blind pursuit of economic growth at the expense of the natural world. Roy's work is also a testament to the power of literature as a form of resistance. For example, her novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, expands on themes of environmental justice within a sprawling narrative that criss-crosses the Indian subcontinent. Her words also evoke a visceral response. For example, in describing a river, she writes, a river once flowed here, but it had been barred wide out of existence. Such vivid imagery makes readers acutely aware of the consequences of human actions on the environment. From a theoretical standpoint, Roy emphasizes the interconnectedness of everything, a concept coined by Timothy Morton as the ecological thought. She critiques neo-imperial capitalist systems for disrupting this natural interconnectedness in imposing artificial distinctions between human and non-human existence. It is intriguing that despite the wide eco-critical interest in her work, her engagement with climate change has not been extensively explored. Is this because her approach diverges from dominant perspectives on the Anthropocene that advocate for broad, large-scale thinking? Let us explore. [Protest sounds in the background] Critics like Ben Richardson have argued that Roy's writing emphasizes the political significance of micro-narratives, the importance of small details that others may overlook. Roy reasons for supporting and recognizing these smaller, often marginalized aspects, envisioning a shift towards valuing the small over the big in the 21st century. By highlighting voices, typically ignored in discussions of history, capitalism and climate change, Roy's approach thus aligns with Bruno Latour's idea of taking account for entities unable to represent themselves. It can be inferred that through such a literary ecology, Roy seeks to amplify these overlooked voices to collectively address societal and environmental challenges aiming for meaningful social change in the face of climate crisis. Let us hear her in The Greater Common Good: “We have to support our small heroes. We have to fight specific wars in specific ways. Who knows? Perhaps that's what the 21st century has in store for us. The dismantling of the big. Big bombs, big dams, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the century of the small. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there's a small God up in heaven, readying herself for us.” [Upbeat music begins to play-the mood is cheery, suggesting hope, possibility] Anthropocene & Teaching Praxis: A discussion facilitated by Debarati Dutta Ananya, Courtney, and Denise, thank you so much for your light, wisdom, and expertise. I learned so much! And hey, this is Debarati, by the way. In the last and final section, we'll share how we work with these concepts and authors in our own classrooms, how we infuse our own teaching, our own research agendas with them. So if you would kindly share what you do with these ideas, these authors in your own classrooms, and also how you think we can do this in our own classrooms, K-12 through college. Debarati Dutta asks Ananya to share Ananya, would you like to start? Ananya’s Response to Debarati This is a question that I have been asking myself as I'm trying to design a course on the Anthropocene now. And I haven't really done that as yet. But I do realize that to teach narratives of the Anthropocene or climate change across Indian classrooms, I cannot only rely on English language texts. Because it is true that my own understanding of the environment was heavily shaped by the authors that I read during my growing up years. And many of them wrote in Bangla, my mother language. So I remember reading Manik Bandopadhyay, Samaresh Bosu, Adwaita Mallabarman, Mahasweta Devi, Rokea Hussain, just to name a few. So now what I try to do in my classes is that I could be teaching any literature course, but I try to integrate a component on environmental humanities. And I do encourage my students to choose a text written in their mother language. And this exercise has been actually very exciting. Because not only have we discovered and rediscovered certain texts that we otherwise would have forgotten, but are very, very interesting in how they talk about climate change or environment in general. But also a way through which many of my students have gone back and reflected on their own language. And that was very satisfying as an exercise. So this is a small step that I have taken. And I hope to bring more of these voices in my teaching pedagogy in the future. Thank you for the question again. Debarati Dutta invites Courtney to share And Courtney, would you like to share? Courtney’s Response to Debarati Yes, thank you so much, Debarati, for these questions. And I think that, based on all our pieces that we have said before, these topics are very relevant for the current classroom. Students are more aware of climate change and environmental decline, and I think no matter what your subject, whether rhetoric or composition or literature, there's ways to bring in not only these topics that are relevant to their current lives, but also teach them about how different voices, especially women's voices, are very important. In this conversation, so I have not yet had a chance to really be able to bring in these voices in this current lens but I will say this conversation has helped me think more especially in terms of how we, how we categorize women's writers, and where we put them in our anthologies, where we put them in our syllabi. What does it mean to kind of foreground our syllabi in terms of, you know, the 19th century in my research. Where did these conversations start? Because it seems like over time, environmental change has been a concern, no matter what time you know, what time period. There's always been concerns about how we are being disconnected from nature, especially when thinking about how indigenous populations had to be able to, you know, move and migrate, and move off of their homelands to be able to make room for as as we seen. You know US expansion, so… Courtney Murray cues Denise Burgher to weigh in I will turn it to Denise. If she has any thoughts she wants to add, as well. Denise Burgher Absolutely thanks, Courtney. It’s has been a mix, right? We are in Climate Departure, and we don't actually talk enough about that. We don't think enough about that. There isn't enough conversation about that. I truthfully have not incorporated these ideas of the Anthropocene directly in my classes. That is absolutely just not something that I've had the opportunity to do, particularly since I haven't taught classes since the pandemic but what I have done prior to the pandemic is deliberately engage students with black women writers in ways that meant and was directed to empower them, bringing their black women's theories and concepts and ideas, not only into the classroom, but into the contemporary moment. This is actually something learned from one of our, my classroom mentors, Dr. Gabriel Foreman, which includes something as simple as insisting that students be exposed to completing voter registration forms during the class work time. I don't care who we vote for, I just want you to vote because voting is a part of what a responsible, active citizen does. And at the end of the day that's what I'm hoping that we're going to do. We're going to train critical thinkers who understand that living in a country, living in a town, living in the community. The quality of that community. The culture of that community is our collective responsibility. So I tried to, and I have in the past done that work both in high school and in college/university classes, but I haven't done it recently, but I will be including the Anthropocene now. Courtney Murray Denise Burgher And if I could just quickly say, Denise, you brought up a good point that I think that the pandemic has been an interesting juncture in terms of how do we move, you know because it wasn't just about this disease or this medical aspect, but also like the environment changed when people were inside. It really did, but we don't even talk about that enough, right? We don't talk about how the, like, you know, low key, I was so relieved. It got so quiet and peaceful. So it was stressful, but there was just this moment that I really haven't heard a lot of people mention that the pandemic brought a pause, like everything and everyone had to just slow down. It sped back up, but it slowed down. Unfortunately, there've been incredibly disastrous consequences that came from that pause. And I'm really clear about that. And I've heard from people who are in classrooms teaching right now and they're struggling and a lot of kids are struggling. You're going to figure out how you're going to make whatever this hellscape is nurturing or safe, or even less unsafe and and and and it's in those moments it's in those ways that we start to see and experience human creativity. And then we start to experience change. Outro Ananya: Thank you for joining us Courtney: and stay tuned for more stories Debarati: of hope and action from around the globe. Denise: Until next time, remember – every voice, every story, and every action counts. [Outro music fades out] [Sound effect: turning off a radio] [End of podcast]