Seminário “Humans of the Anthropocene: comics and the representation of humankind in a geologically transformed planet”, com Hugo Almeida
06 October 2022 · 17h00
Resumo (em inglês)
This communication will address the relationship between anthropogenic environmental change and representations of humans and humankind in comics.
The concept of the Anthropocene proposes that a new geological epoch has resulted from the destabilization of planetary life-support systems, caused by human industrial societies (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). According to historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009), “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history,” prompting the reappraisal of humankind (or a particular technocientific configuration of it) as a geological power. My ongoing work assesses the mutations which the concept of “human” has been undergoing, by looking at two distinct examples in comics through the lens of the Anthropocene.
The first is Kamandi: the Last Boy On Earth! (1972-1978), by US superhero comics author Jack Kirby. Kamandi is a blond, blue-eyed white boy—the Enlightenment subject, as it were. He is the sole survivor of XX century Western civilization in a post-apocalyptic Earth, which has been claimed by anthropomorphic nonhuman animals. Although in Kamandi’s view the world has become a new wilderness waiting to be conquered, it is also evident that the planet has moved beyond Man’s influence. While nonhuman animals have become civilized, humans have regressed into an “animalized” subordinate and non-linguistic state, thus inverting the Humanist hierarchies between “Man” and “animal.” Ironically, Kamandi’s existence as an “animal” that speaks, challenges the human/nonhuman dichotomy, reframing it as a form of upholding social, rather than biological, hierarchies. Although the series does not conceive a way out of a Humanist worldview, it nonetheless finds its flaws by treating “Man” as an “animal.”
The second work is Travel (2008), by avant garde manga author Yūichi Yokoyama. In Travel, three individuals embark on a train. The landscapes which the train traverses are geometric and slick, as if engineered, producing an ecological uncanny that parallels clunky computer simulations. Urban infrastructures blend with tightly managed riverbeds and forest cover, reconstructing “nature” through the rational grids of the Enlightenment. Humans are brought down to the level of things, either by reducing them to collective actants who behave like Cartesian automata; or by becoming landscape features themselves as other passenger trains appear within view. In this way, Travel asserts humans’ indelible presence in the landscape while mocking pretenses of subjectivity.
While Kamandi begrudgingly identifies inconsistencies within its Humanist framework, brought forth by its catastrophic scenario, Travel is an unabashed anti-humanist manifesto, which nevertheless revels at the effects of human intervention over the environment. Through these examples, we will discuss how views on the environment in turn produce changes in how we view ourselves.
Bibliografia
Chakrabarty, D (2009). The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry, 35(2): 197-222
Crutzen, PJ and Stoermer, EF. (2000) The “Anthropocene”. IGBP Newsletter 41: 17-18; Steffen W, Richardson, K, Rockström, J, et al. (2015) Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science 347(6223): 736-746.