CEP International Conference

This conference organised by Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IITKharagpur in association with University of Oldenburg, Germany and IMIS Bhubaneswar can be attended both through online and offline mode.

Overview

With anthropocenity driving the planet towards brink of extinction, the survival of humanity hinges on reconfiguring its relationship with narratives. Rather than merely using narrative spaces to record encounters with phenomenological realities, narratives should become an effective mechanism for actualizing a post-anthropocentric imaginary. John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes, Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables of Planet in Crisis, Rajat Chowdhury’s The Butterfly Effect, James Bradley’s Clade and Jaspreet Singh’s Face imagine such a world by combining multiple trans-disciplinary strands. In their bid to problematize and transcend the existent anthropocentrism these writers produce new ecocratic sensibilities through their narratives, searching for what can stand as foundational essences of the post anthropocentric world that we seek to actualize at this juncture.

Simultaneously, anthropocentric narrators maintain a disjunctive relationality with organization of modern narratives and engage with planetary sciences, emphasizing the need for a “new philosophical anthropology”. However, this is a process that partakes of side-lining modern narrative’s colonial genealogy and overlooking the degree to which precolonial knowledge systems were integral to planetary and geological sciences. Despite these challenges, anthropocentric narratives offer a powerful means of grappling with the urgent issues facing our planet and imagining a post-anthropocentric future.