Subaltern Studies 2.0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYNJHzyPYfQ  Dec 21, 2023
Subaltern Studies 2.0, edited by Milinda Banerjee and Jelle J. P. Wouters (Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, 2022) may be construed with some reason as an attempt to take the now defunct Sublaltern Studies project into the new, relatively uncharted territory that we know by the name of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is our present age, the first age when humans are no longer just biological but rather geological agents: the impress of their activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, is now felt in what is known to some as global warming and to others as climate change. What would a subaltern studies project for this age which is still unfolding, rather calamitously, look like? Banerjee and Wouters have together written what some will call a rather wild work and one that, in my judgment, is wondrously risk-taking and intellectual energizing. They invoke a future that would not be so dominated by humans, a future of yak democracy and fungal democracy, a future hospitable to human and non-human species alike, and one where we shall strive together to redeem ourselves from the various "falls" that have characterized the history of the last several thousand years -- the fall that led us to separate non-humans from humans, women from men (and thereby denigrate and demean them), those without speech from those with speech, and (though this is articulated in various different languages) the colonized from the colonizers