Remembering the Anthropocene: Memorials Beyond the Human

Clara de Massol de Rebetz, King’s College London.

This talk revolves around my recent book, Remembering the Anthropocene: Memorials Beyond the Human. The book defines and apprehends the developing field of environmental memory studies and reflects on the possibilities, challenges, prospects and limitations of culturally remembering (in) the Anthropocene. Located at the intersection of environmental humanities and memory studies, the analysis draws on and surveys a series of Anthropocene-related memorials. This then leads to an examination of different memory agents across histories – past, present and future – interacting as to facilitate an investigation of memorialisation politics under new ecological regimes, within and beyond the human.

The case studies – contemporary monuments and artworks – are framed as cultural memory forms and practices, defined as infrastructures affecting and reflecting societies in time: how we make sense of the world around us in relation to time. The research seeks to push the field of memory studies towards the future by providing a modelling of memorial dynamics. It is established that Anthropocenic prospects of a posthuman future would allow a decentring of limited humanist memory models. As a central idea and organising principle, memory still prevails, but the research probes at the limit of westerncentric humanist memory studies to introduce nonhuman memory actants.

Building on the case studies’ analysis, I argue that the immediate humanist-driven reformist solutions to anthropogenic decay and extinction are ultimately politically impotent; they are unable to sustain or foster radical change in the sense that they fail to generate suitable alternatives. Instead, I propose that, from the waste and ruins of the Anthropocene, other modes of collective survival and extinction could emerge; ones which decentre the human of humanism by instead hinging on a differential multispecies ethos of crosstemporal co- existence. Memory in the Anthropocene might then start with the human but might also end without it.

Bio

Dr Clara de Massol is a lecturer and researcher in memory studies and environmental humanities based at King’s College London. Her research, grounded in cultural and literary studies, explores artistic, cultural and institutional memory forms and practices through posthuman and postcolonial lenses to address the fraught relationships between colonial practices, extractivism, and institutional memory politics. Clara’s work previously looked at how contemporary art mediates memory, particularly in the context of extinction and collective grief. In 2019, she was the recipient of the Memory Studies Association’s Excellent Paper award and her 2024 monograph Remembering the Anthropocene: Memorials Beyond the Human, published in the Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies series, surveys the developing field of environmental memory studies.

This event is organized by the ERC-funded Project Ecologies of Violence in collaboration with the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies and the Network for Environmental Humanities.

There will be a reception following the event.

Please register at neh@uu.nl.