203 : Postcolonial Studies
203 : Postcolonial Studies
Rethinking Human Agency and Representation in the Anthropocene: Politics, Posthumanism, and Storytelling
Personal Information
Name : Shruti Sonani
Batch : M.A ,Sem - 3 (2024-2026)
Enrollment number: 5108240033
E - mail address : shrutisonani2@gmail.com
Table of Contents
Abstract
Introduction
The Politics of Nature in the Anthropocene
The Posthuman and the Animal
Storytelling and Geological Imagination
Synthesis and Comparative Analysis
Conclusion
Works Cited
Abstract
The Anthropocene—an epoch in which human activity has become a planetary force—has transformed the intellectual landscape across disciplines, compelling scholars to rethink politics, ethics, and imagination. This assignment explores three intersecting perspectives on the Anthropocene: Kathleen McAfee’s “The Politics of Nature in the Anthropocene” (2016), Lars Schmeink’s “The Anthropocene, the Posthuman, and the Animal” (2016), and Alexa Weik von Mossner’s “Imagining Geological Agency: Storytelling in the Anthropocene” (2016).
McAfee interrogates the political construction of “nature” and exposes how global ecological discourse often conceals capitalist, colonial, and technocratic inequalities. Schmeink examines how posthumanist fiction, particularly in the works of Margaret Atwood and Paolo Bacigalupi, reveals the collapse of human exceptionalism and critiques biotechnological capitalism’s commodification of life. Mossner, meanwhile, addresses the imaginative crisis of representing planetary-scale change, arguing that storytelling functions as a vital mode of emotional cognition and ethical engagement.
Together, these three essays reveal that the Anthropocene is not only a geological reality but a multidimensional phenomenon encompassing political, ontological, and aesthetic dimensions. The paper synthesizes their ideas to argue that confronting the Anthropocene requires democratic ecological politics, posthuman ethical reorientation, and narrative imagination capable of bridging the gap between knowledge and empathy. Ultimately, the Anthropocene emerges not merely as an era of crisis but as a profound invitation to reimagine what it means to be human within a shared planetary ecology.
Keywords: Anthropocene, Political Ecology, Posthumanism, Storytelling, Environmental Ethics, Climate Fiction, Ecocriticism, Power, Imagination.
Introduction
The concept of the Anthropocene has radically transformed the way humanity understands its relationship with the planet. It challenges traditional boundaries between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, history and geology. The Anthropocene, as a proposed geological epoch, signifies the moment when human activity has become a dominant force shaping Earth’s systems — from climate and biodiversity to geological processes. Yet, this recognition is not merely scientific; it is also profoundly philosophical, political, and cultural. It raises unsettling questions about collective responsibility, justice, and imagination in a world where humans have acquired geological agency.
Three significant works—Kathleen McAfee’s “The Politics of Nature in the Anthropocene” (2016), Lars Schmeink’s “The Anthropocene, the Posthuman, and the Animal” (2016), and Alexa Weik von Mossner’s “Imagining Geological Agency: Storytelling in the Anthropocene” (2016)—offer complementary yet distinct insights into these questions. McAfee examines the political dimensions of environmental discourse and critiques the unequal structures underlying global ecological narratives. Schmeink explores posthumanist reconfigurations of the human through dystopian fiction, revealing how biotechnological capitalism and ecological collapse redefine the meaning of species and agency. Mossner, from a narrative and affective perspective, investigates how storytelling functions as a vital mode of imagining human agency and ethical responsibility within the vast temporal and spatial scales of the Anthropocene.
I. The Politics of Nature in the Anthropocene: McAfee’s Critique of Ecological Universalism
Kathleen McAfee’s “The Politics of Nature in the Anthropocene” situates the environmental crisis within the realm of power and inequality. She argues that “Nature” itself is not a neutral or universal category but a deeply political construct, historically shaped by imperialism, capitalism, and scientific authority. McAfee challenges the tendency in Anthropocene discourse to speak of “humanity” as a single, unified agent that has collectively transformed the Earth. This universal framing, she contends, obscures the stark differences in responsibility and vulnerability among nations, classes, and communities.
McAfee begins by observing that Nature, in contemporary environmental discourse, is portrayed as a singular entity “under siege by society.” This representation implies a universal human guilt and responsibility, yet it neglects the asymmetrical realities of ecological exploitation. For her, the politics of nature are fundamentally about entitlement and accountability—“who is entitled to what, who owes what to whom, and who gets to decide.” The Anthropocene, then, cannot be separated from the question of who benefits from ecological transformation and who bears its costs.
Her critique extends to the way scientific authority has been used to define and manage global environmental policies. By invoking Enlightenment rationality, McAfee shows how the rhetoric of reason and expertise—represented by scientists like E. O. Wilson and Paul Crutzen—has historically justified top-down control over both nature and human populations. She connects this to a longer history of “scientific colonialism,” where Western technological projects, from hydrological engineering to forestry management, were justified in the name of progress and rationality but often resulted in dispossession and ecological harm. The Anthropocene, in McAfee’s view, risks reproducing these dynamics by turning planetary stewardship into a technocratic project dominated by a privileged few.
She critiques contemporary initiatives such as the Ecomodernist Manifesto and the concept of “planetary boundaries,” which claim that scientific knowledge can define safe limits for human activity. These frameworks, she argues, promote a neoliberal vision of sustainability—one that seeks to “decouple” economic growth from environmental degradation through technological innovation. While presented as pragmatic solutions, such approaches perpetuate the same capitalist logic that caused the crisis. The Ecomodernists’ claim that humanity can “leave more room for nature” through nuclear energy, genetic engineering, and urban intensification, McAfee warns, is a form of green technocracy that excludes local communities and reinforces corporate dominance.
Central to McAfee’s argument is her rejection of the idea that “humanity” as a species is equally responsible for the Anthropocene. Citing critics like Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, she emphasizes that it was not an undifferentiated humanity but “capitalists in a small corner of the Western world” who initiated the fossil-fuel economy and laid the foundation for the modern ecological crisis. The Anthropocene, therefore, should be understood not as an epoch of universal human agency but as an outcome of anthropos-as-capital — a historical system of power, production, and inequality.
II. Posthumanism, Hypercapitalism, and the Crisis of the Human: Schmeink’s Biopunk Vision
Lars Schmeink’s “The Anthropocene, the Posthuman, and the Animal” examines how contemporary speculative fiction—particularly the works of Margaret Atwood and Paolo Bacigalupi—dramatizes the ethical and existential dilemmas of the Anthropocene. His essay situates literature within the cultural response to planetary crisis, showing how dystopian narratives reveal the collapse of human exceptionalism and the rise of the posthuman.
Schmeink interprets the Anthropocene not only as a geological event but as a cultural and ontological rupture. The traditional notion of “the human” as a rational, autonomous subject is destabilized by ecological catastrophe and biotechnological transformation. In Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, humanity’s technological hubris and capitalist greed have pushed the planet to the brink of collapse. Both fictional worlds depict societies governed by hypercapitalism, where corporations commodify life itself—human bodies, animal species, and even genetic codes—turning the organic into a tool for profit.
Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity, Schmeink describes these dystopian futures as extensions of contemporary consumer society, where human desires and identities are manipulated by economic forces. In Atwood’s world, biotechnological corporations manufacture diseases and their corresponding cures, converting health and illness into commodities. The human body becomes a site of exploitation, reflecting the logic of what Schmeink calls the economics of scarcity. Similarly, in Bacigalupi’s Thailand, “calorie companies” engineer sterile crops and global food monopolies, causing ecological devastation and human suffering. Both worlds literalize McAfee’s political critique: the Anthropocene is not caused by humanity in general but by a system of capitalist biopower that instrumentalizes nature for economic gain.
Schmeink’s analysis moves beyond socio-economic critique to explore the ontological consequences of such systems. In these narratives, the boundaries between human, animal, and machine blur. Atwood’s Crakers—a genetically engineered posthuman species—represent a radical attempt to transcend the destructive instincts of Homo sapiens. In Bacigalupi’s novel, the “Windups,” artificially created humans designed for servitude, expose the moral bankruptcy of anthropocentric hierarchies. Both authors use the figure of the posthuman to interrogate the myth of human superiority and to imagine alternative modes of coexistence.
Schmeink’s engagement with theorists like Cary Wolfe and Jacques Derrida deepens this critique. Following Wolfe’s notion that human identity is defined through the exclusion of the “animal,” and Derrida’s reflections on the industrialized exploitation of nonhuman life, Schmeink argues that the Anthropocene demands an ethical reconfiguration of species relations. The mechanistic view of nature as replaceable and subordinate—what Val Plumwood calls “the logic of mastery”—is revealed as unsustainable. By creating transgenic beings that escape their intended functions, both Atwood and Bacigalupi show that life resists commodification and reasserts its agency in unpredictable ways.
III. Storytelling and Imagination in the Anthropocene: Mossner’s Narrative Ecology
Alexa Weik von Mossner’s “Imagining Geological Agency: Storytelling in the Anthropocene” explores a different but complementary dimension of the Anthropocene—its imaginative and affective challenges. Drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that humans have become “geological agents,” Mossner examines how narratives, both fictional and nonfictional, help us to conceptualize and emotionally engage with this unprecedented form of agency. Her focus is not on politics or technology but on the imaginative labor required to make sense of the Anthropocene’s temporal and spatial vastness.
Mossner begins with Chakrabarty’s observation that while humans can act as geological forces, they cannot directly experience themselves as such. The scale of the Anthropocene—stretching across millennia—exceeds the limits of individual perception and historical consciousness. This disjunction produces what literary theorist Lawrence Buell calls a “crisis of the imagination.” To address this crisis, Mossner turns to storytelling as a uniquely human means of extending understanding and empathy across time and space.
Through her analysis, Mossner argues that narrative operates through two psychological mechanisms—transportation and performance. When readers or viewers engage with a story, they are “transported” into an alternative world and participate in its construction through imagination and emotion. This process allows them to experience, in simulated form, the consequences of human actions on planetary systems. Storytelling, therefore, becomes a form of cognitive and ethical simulation—a way to practice empathy with future generations, nonhuman life, and even the Earth itself.
Mossner observes that the emerging genre of climate fiction (cli-fi) plays a central role in shaping Anthropocene consciousness. Works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy, Dale Pendell’s The Great Bay, and films such as The Day After Tomorrow or The Age of Stupid translate scientific data into emotionally resonant narratives. These texts often blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, combining empirical projections with speculative imagination. In doing so, they make visible the otherwise abstract phenomena of climate change, extinction, and “slow violence” — a term borrowed from Rob Nixon to describe the gradual, often invisible forms of environmental harm that affect the poor and marginalized.
Importantly, Mossner argues that storytelling does more than merely represent catastrophe; it enables affective engagement and moral reflection. Through transportation and empathy, readers are moved to reconsider their relationship with the planet. Unlike scientific reports, which appeal to reason and data, fiction appeals to feeling and imagination, thereby expanding the moral horizons of the Anthropocene subject. However, Mossner cautions that not all attempts at Anthropocene storytelling succeed. She notes that even scientists like James Hansen, who embed speculative stories in their popular-science writing, may fail to evoke emotional resonance if their narratives lack human depth and imaginative vitality. Successful Anthropocene narratives must balance cognitive rigor with aesthetic and emotional power.
IV. Synthesis: From Political Ecology to Posthuman Ethics to Narrative Imagination
Taken together, the works of McAfee, Schmeink, and Mossner form a comprehensive intellectual map of the Anthropocene. Each engages a different dimension—political, ontological, and representational—but all converge on the recognition that the Anthropocene is both a crisis and an opportunity to rethink humanity’s role on Earth.
McAfee’s critique reminds us that the Anthropocene cannot be understood apart from the structures of global inequality that produced it. By unveiling the political economy behind environmental discourse, she warns against depoliticized universalism and emphasizes the need for justice-centered ecological thinking. Her analysis resonates with Schmeink’s fictional dystopias, which dramatize the same dynamics of exploitation through the lens of biocapitalism and genetic engineering. Both expose how human domination of nature is inseparable from domination among humans.
Schmeink extends McAfee’s critique into the domain of ontology and ethics. Where McAfee reveals the political hierarchies of the Anthropocene, Schmeink exposes its species hierarchies—the anthropocentric assumption that human life is more valuable than nonhuman life. His exploration of posthumanism reframes the crisis of the Anthropocene as a crisis of identity: if the human has become a geological agent, it must also confront its entanglement with the nonhuman. The posthuman turn thus aligns with McAfee’s call for a plural, decentered understanding of nature and agency.
Mossner, meanwhile, complements both by shifting the focus from critique to imagination and affect. While McAfee and Schmeink diagnose the problems of power and identity, Mossner offers a pathway toward transformation through narrative empathy. Her emphasis on storytelling as a tool of cognitive and ethical expansion suggests that the Anthropocene is not only to be analyzed but also felt and imagined. Through literature and film, audiences can internalize the planetary scale of human impact and begin to envision more sustainable and compassionate futures.
Conclusion
The Anthropocene confronts humanity with a paradox: we are both the most powerful and the most fragile species on the planet. Our collective agency is vast enough to alter the Earth’s climate, yet our moral, political, and imaginative capacities often fail to grasp the magnitude of that agency. The three essays analyzed here illuminate this paradox from distinct but interrelated angles.
Kathleen McAfee exposes the Anthropocene as a political construct, shaped by economic inequality and technocratic control. She calls for a democratization of ecological knowledge and a politics of justice that acknowledges historical responsibility. Lars Schmeink, through his analysis of biopunk dystopias, redefines the Anthropocene as a posthuman condition in which human exceptionalism collapses under the weight of ecological and technological entanglement. His vision urges an ethical reorientation toward coexistence and interdependence. Alexa Weik von Mossner, in turn, identifies storytelling as a vital imaginative practice that allows humans to emotionally comprehend their geological agency and to cultivate empathy across temporal, spatial, and species boundaries.
Together, these thinkers chart a path beyond despair toward awareness and responsibility. The Anthropocene demands not only scientific solutions but also political justice, ethical humility, and imaginative courage. To survive and flourish in this epoch, humanity must learn to think and feel beyond itself—to recognize that our stories, technologies, and politics are inseparable from the planetary systems we inhabit. In this sense, the Anthropocene is not just an era of crisis but an invitation to reimagine what it means to be human in a more-than-human world.
References :
McAfee, Kathleen. “The Politics of Nature in the Anthropocene.” RCC Perspectives, no. 2, 2016, pp. 65–72. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26241360. Accessed 2 Sept. 2025.
SCHMEINK, LARS. “The Anthropocene, the Posthuman, and the Animal.” Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction, Liverpool University Press, 2016, pp. 71–118. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ps33cv.6. Accessed 2 Sept. 2025.
von Mossner, Alexa Weik. “Imagining Geological Agency: Storytelling in the Anthropocene.” RCC Perspectives, no. 2, 2016, pp. 83–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26241362. Accessed 2 Sept. 2025.
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