The Alabama Symposium is an annual event involving literary scholars, historians, and graduate students from colleges and universities in Alabama and surrounding states. Each year, a different institution hosts the event, which is focused on a topic related to our field. This free, one-day symposium includes a two-hour morning workshop/roundtable discussion on a shared set of readings and position papers (circulated in advance), followed by lunch and two talks in the afternoon. Auburn University at Montgomery will host the 2019 meeting, and this year’s theme is the Anthropocene.
Perhaps no concept has become dominant in so many fields as rapidly as the Anthropocene. Literally meaning “The Age of Humans,” this is the proposed name for our current geological epoch, beginning when human activities started to have a noticeable impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Nobel-prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen popularized the term in 2000, spurring nearly two decades of debate, with most scholarship centered on defining the characteristics of the Anthropocene and in establishing its dates. Crutzen initially proposed that the Anthropocene began with the Industrial Revolution, citing James Watt’s patent of the steam engine in 1784 as a possible marker, while other scientists have since argued for the “Orbis spike” of 1610 or the “bomb spike” of 1964. Long embraced by the natural sciences, the Anthropocene has become commonplace in the humanities and social sciences, where it has taken firm enough hold to engender a thoroughgoing critique. Indeed, criticisms of the Anthropocene have become so familiar that in some circles, Jeremy Davies quips, the Anthropocene is “considered rather worn-out and déclassé.” Detractors see the Anthropocene as perniciously universalist: this “age of man,” many argue, is in fact an era in which Western colonial powers have systematically plundered natural resources, passing the direst burdens of climate change to people in the Global South. Other observers see Anthropocene discourse as harmfully technocratic. As feminist thinkers point out, the Anthropocene is often aligned with a disembodied “view from nowhere,” which purports to be neutral, yet abets conceptions of the planet as a “system” to be managed, preferably by first-world experts. In response to these and other critiques, some scholars have called for “multiple, debatable, and polemical narratives” of environmental change to supplant a “single hegemonic narrative that is supposedly apolitical.”
Is the Anthropocene useful to the humanities, and to eighteenth and nineteenth century studies specifically? This will be the central question of this year’s symposium. Readings will include several (short) seminal essays in Anthropocene studies, as well as selections from Jeremy Davies’s The Birth of the Anthropocene (University of California Press, 2016) and Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor’s Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (Penn State University Press, 2017). No prior knowledge of Anthropocene studies is required for this symposium: the major goal is for participants to learn about the intersections of the Anthropocene with eighteenth and nineteenth century studies.