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Accepted Paper:

In search of interscalar narrative vehicles  
Timothy Neale (Deakin University)

Paper short abstract:

In a recent article, Gabrielle Hecht suggests that 'the Anthropocene' presents a vital opportunity for formulating emplaced narrations of present predicaments. In this roundtable, I reflect on an ongoing search for 'interscalar vehicles' appropriate to this task.

Paper long abstract:

In their 2018 article 'Interscalar vehicles for an African Anthropocene,' anthropologist and historian Gabrielle Hecht debates the merits of the recent arrival of the Anthropocene to the humanities expansive conceptual shorelines. The true danger for humanities scholarship, Hecht suggests, is that our Anthropocenic excursions risk submitting to geologists' abstractions, thereby ignoring the need to keep things 'in place'. Alternately, the concept also arguably represents a vital opportunity for formulating emplaced narrations of present predicaments while also 'keeping the planet and all of its humans in the same conceptual frame' (Hecht, 135). As for the protagonists of sci-fi films like Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Innerspace (1987), such narrative work requires the selection of appropriate 'interscalar vehicles', meaning objects or entities whose journeys across scales illustrate how temporal and spatial bounds govern worlds. In my contribution to this roundtable, I will reflect on my own search for such vehicles for analysis, thinking through the potential utility of Hecht's method through narratives of elemental entities and exchanges.

References:

Gabrielle Hecht, "Interscalar vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On waste, temporality, and violence," Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 135.

Panel P38
Storying (against/beyond/through) environmental crisis
  Session 1 Thursday 5 December, 2019, -