Resisting the Disaster: Between Exhaustion and Creation

Abstract

This chapter responds to debates on the anthropocene, by transversalising planetarian social, technological and natural disasters suffered in Africa, the Pacific, Brazil, Haïti and elsewhere, through past and present colonisation. ‘Anthropologist of micropolitical hope, Barbara Glowczewski, is among the vanguard of key global Guattarian thinkers. Deploying Guattari’s three registers of ecosophy to understand the foliatedness of disaster in the anthropocene, she provides a range of examples, from artists’ responses to crises and neoliberal betrayals, collective intelligence marshalled against the violence of privatisation, experimentations leading to micro-social innovations challenging the criminalisation of asylum seekers, and political actions against the endo-colonialist policies of settler states. Eschewing victimal discourses traded like stocks by big media, she eviscerates the dehumanising logic of humanitarian care in the form of ‘assistancialism’ and as some Aboriginals know it, ‘sit down money’.’ (Gary Genosko, 2017). First published in French in 2011.