Forms of affective thinking that place at their heart the “primal responsibility we bear towards others”, he argued, can help constitute “a transformational practice that points beyond unsustainable arrangements towards better ones from which, in turn, richer conceptions of the human, untrammelled by racial styles of thought, may have already started to emerge”. Gilroy is not alone in his call for new modes of thinking in a fast-changing and increasingly uncertain contemporary world: over the past decade the humanities have seen a surge in critical work that calls for new approaches to theorizing 21st-century culture: affect studies, post-postmodernism, posthumanism, metamodernism, and the like.' (Editorial introduction)
'This article considers Alexis Wright’s 2006 novel Carpentaria in relation to climate change and temporality. Through an appraisal of previous critical work on the novel, an analysis of its anti-linear structure and stylistic organization, and close textual engagement with the novel’s latent critique of western temporal frameworks, it argues that Carpentaria presents a specifically Indigenous Waanyi temporality of climate change and environmental damage that resists a linear Anthropocene teleology, whilst registering the threat of climate change and environmental disaster to Indigenous livelihoods. This approach identifies the inherent problems with linear understandings of time, and defines how these are entangled with the silencing of Aboriginal histories and threat to Indigenous survival. Ultimately, the article argues that the novel’s centralizing of Indigenous experience articulates a specific Indigenous Australian cultural approach to climate change and environmental disaster, which should be included in global conversations on climate change literature.' (Publication abstract)
