Postcolonial Futures: Climate, Race, and the Yet-to-Come

Abstract

[T]here is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism, since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters. Human mobility features centrally within the climate change imaginary. So it goes that if allowed to gain purchase on our world, climate change will unleash unprecedented migration and displacement. Elsewhere I have argued that within the rapidly growing discourse on migration and climate change we find an emerging racial script.2 In what follows, I add to this conversation by showing how the figure of the climate change migrant or climate refugee3 bears a strong affective resemblance to that of the monster. And monsters, as cultural theory reminds us, signify.4 Drawing from Michel Foucault (“Abnormal”) and Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis Gordon (“On Divine Warning”), my claim is that in its monstrousness the figure of the climate migrant or climate refugee signifies a coming racial future. That is, it generates a foreboding sense that the twin European fantasies of impermeability and containment have run their course,5 a future that ultimately threatens to dissolve the colonial/racial hierarchy in which a “white” European humanism is elevated above all other forms of difference. But if the first claim set out here is that the figure of the climate migrant designates a racial future by virtue of its monstrousness, the second is that efforts to govern the climate migrant, paradoxically, have little to do with governing “the racial Other” of climate change and everything to do with resuscitating European humanism amid its own unravelling. The argument unfolds in three parts. The figure of the climate migrant designates a particular kind of Other6 within the context of climate change. The first part of the argument asks whether postcolonial theory is adequate for coming to terms with the Other amid our current condition of pending environmental catastrophe, whether understood as climate change or the Anthropocene. The suggestion is that postcolonial methodology may not be up to the task or that it may need to be modified. The central claim is that while postcolonial methodology is predicated on distinguishing difference in the dialectical idiom of different from, the form of difference pertinent to climate change and migration is the yet-to-come. The second part of the argument builds an account in which the yet-to-come figure of the climate migrant or climate refugee is synonymous with the monstrous by virtue of its epistemological excess and ambiguity. The final stage of the argument then returns to the question of humanism. I argue that the figure of the climate migrant is deployed as a biopolitical tactic of humanist and thus racial renewal in response to the crisis of climate change. Is postcolonial methodology best suited to addressing questions of difference in light of the wider futurist turn animating much current cultural theory? By “futurist turn,” I have in mind, for example, the recent outpouring of work across the humanities and social sciences on climate change and the concept of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene concept is significant for numerous reasons. As Dipesh Chakrabarty reminds us in his essay, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” it is the moment when the human becomes fully manifest in earth history and, paradoxically, the moment in which we lose our ability to comprehend this effect (14). I take from this that the primary historical significance of the Anthropocene lies in the way its proponents give finality to the blurring of Nature and the Human, even while we know this distinction to have been an artifact of European imperial power. But the Anthropocene is additionally significant because by calling the category of the Human into question it forces critical race theory to reconsider how racial power is traced in the Anthropocene if by racial power we refer to the myriad ways groups of people are designated outside the category of the Human. In other words, the Anthropocene demands that we historicize dehumanization at the very moment in which the Human becomes posthuman, when the Human is no longer understood as internal to itself (if it ever was) but is instead being re-imagined as a reflection of the totality of the Earth system. And yet it would seem that attempts to theorize the Anthropocene have mostly elided the thematic of race. Thus, as we approach the Anthropocene analytically a healthy dose of caution seems warranted insofar as among the more prevalent themes emerging within discussions about the Anthropocene are those of long-term human survival, extinction, sexual difference, social reproduction, and, by implication, the kind of human that will endure the coming epoch. And these are all important themes because lurking within them we find the disturbing notion of survivability, disturbing because contained within survivability is the political question of which bodies will come to be designated as bes