Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene ed. by Anna L. Tsing et al. (review)

Abstract

P disorientation is perhaps your first hint: this is not scholarship as usual. A white page opens on the cluttered desktop landscape of the computer screen, populated by colorful illustrations of fire, kudzu, and an emerald ash borer. One is compelled by the visual sensuality of the experience to sit with it for a moment, to “stay with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway (2016) might say, of exploring the patchy problematics of the Anthropocene. Attending to the materiality of land, water, and atmosphere-transforming projects, this transdisciplinary anthology centers four historical concurrences at the intersection of human and nonhuman activity, described as “Anthropocene Detonators”: invasion, empire, capital, and acceleration. Here there be monsters, certainly, but perhaps also opportunities for responsiveness and responsibility. One encounters, mingling on the landing page, a host of feral entities in motion: toxic fog, antibiotics, comb jellies, anti-fouling paint, bee villains. Each is associated with one of the four detonators that structure the project. These focal points are accompanied by one of 79 field reports representing a window into a different multispecies ecology that proliferates in the intermingling trails of human infrastructures and nonhuman entities. In the upper left-hand corner, an illustrated master key directs the reader to an index of related cases and concepts. It is a feature which contributes to the sense in which the project registers as an atlas, further articulating its virtual spatiality by introducing a reading room in which texts and other