Hope in the Anthropocene: agency, governance and negation

Extract

Since the mid-2010s, the concept of hope (and also despair) has received interest from environmental humanities, post-humanism and international studies scholarship that seeks to contextualize it in the Anthropocene condition, or what is widely known as the end of Nature. Valery Waldow, Pol Bargués and David Chandler's Hope in the Anthropocene is one of the newest additions to this literature and it makes significant contributions. The edited volume focuses on the three dimensions of the under-theorized concept of hope in political thought: agency, governance and negation. The section on agency provides a useful background to the already existing reflections on hope (but also to other emotions surrounding Anthropocene politics), whereas the section on governance features the relationships between power and policy-making in the Anthropocene. The third section, on negation, offers much-needed new problematizations and concerns for political theorizing in the Anthropocene. Here, the contributors interrogate the connections of the concept to the Anthropocene, deploying the lenses of radical openness, strangeness and affirmation.