“The entire face of the Earth today bears the imprint of human power.” Thus remarked George-Louis Leclerc in his Epochs of Nature (1778), where he claimed that the Earth had entered an Epoch of Man—and recommended that human beings “set the temperature” of the Earth itself and ensure the survival of “human civilization” through feats of geoengineering. A century later, geologist Antonio Stoppani announced the coming of the “Anthropozoic Era,” as the human species became a “geological element” that “does not pale in the face of the greatest forces of the globe.”
Much more recently, the term “Anthropocene” was coined by geologist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer in 2011. As the successor to the period of remarkable climactic stability known as the Holocene, the “Anthropocene” was intended to capture the long-lasting, substantial, global changes to the environment wrought by human agency. The term is now used across disciplines and in public conversations about ecological crisis. But the concept and argument of the Anthropocene, as well as the social, cultural, and ecological conditions it identifies, bears a much deeper history than is often acknowledged, with far-reaching implications for scholars working on the period spanning at least the sixteenth century to the present day.
The Anthropocene has received little attention in music studies so far. This relative neglect may be unsurprising, given the epistemological distances that separate areas of geological and musicological inquiry. And yet, the Anthropocene can also alter the ways in which we think about music’s relation to (more commonly studied categories of) nature, landscape, ecology and climate change. With this discussion-based symposium, we hope to establish a set of positions for music scholars that take seriously the demands the Anthropocene places on humanistic scholarship.
More particularly, this two-day conference will seek out ways in which music scholars can not only learn from, but also provide new insights into the Anthropocene. As several historians have recently noted, the term “Anthropocene” can misleadingly suggest the impact of humanity as a whole on the global environment. In reality, however, “steam-powered clique[s]” of white, wealthy, Christian, European men (Malm 2014) sought to remake the world in their image, exalting themselves as “human” in the process—and as superior to the less-than-human communities whom they have oppressed. The work of Anthropos has included (but is not limited to) the perpetuation of systems and processes of fossil capitalism, enslavement, colonialism, genocide, racism, resource extraction, and dispossession—in short, the nexus of “Man” identified by Caribbean cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter.
This conference brings musical and sonic resources and archives to bear on the history and politics of environmental justice, the convergence of anti-racism and climate action, and new environmentalism proposed by these writers. We invite papers from scholars of music and sound that seek to develop a “musicology in/of the Anthropocene.” We especially encourage papers that engage issues of decoloniality, and treat globally situated, transnational, and non-Western topics. We welcome papers by graduate students, emerging scholars, contingent scholars, and independent researchers from around the world.