Archives of the Anthropocene: Visual Grammars of Deep Time (Elements)

From geological maps to photographs and films of snow, ice, clouds, and coral reefs, visual inscriptions mediate the construction and codification of extractive modes of seeing Earth’s subterranean depths and aerial heights. Tracing the territorial ambitions of the archipelagic empires of Japan and the United States in the twentieth century, Archives of the Anthropocene explores crucial moments of overlap between the geoscientific history of studying Earth’s deep time and the geopolitical history of territorialization, militarization, and extraction in the Pacific and polar regions. By engaging with contemporary critiques of settler colonialism, liberal humanism, and nonhuman labor from the perspective of environmental media studies, Yuriko Furuhata unsettles the universalist narrative of the Anthropocene, calling us to instead imagine an anticolonial and anti-imperial future for the planet.

Yuriko Furuhata is Professor of East Asian Studies and Associate Member of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. She is the author of Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control and Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics, both also published by Duke University Press.