Multiple Anthropocenes: pluralizing space–time as a response to ‘the Anthropocene’

This article examines how ‘the Anthropocene’ is conceptualized within discourses on security, politics, and ethics, and is narrated as a global-collective experience for all of humanity with an identifiable beginning, common horizon, and shared fate. However, this space–time framing assumes knowledge and experience not actually shared. Even critical engagements with the Anthropocene frequently invoke cosmopolitan space–time referents when seeking to intervene or call for action. Instead, we turn to the metaphor of the palimpsest and its discussion by Jacques Derrida alongside the ‘worldism’ and ‘multiple worlds’ of Anna Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling to propose the heterogeneity of space–time. Doing so de-centres monolithic portrayals of climate change as ‘the Anthropocene’ and enables ‘Multiple Anthropocenes’, or the multiplicity of experiences of extinction and visions of political and ethical response. We conclude by discussing some insights from indigenous and queer space–time perspectives that narrate various climate change experiences that are evaded and written-over.