After Extinction

2018

Richard Grusin, Editor

A multidisciplinary exploration of extinction and what comes next

After Extinction looks at the future of humans and nonhumans, exploring how the scale of risk posed by extinction has changed in light of the accelerated networks of the twenty-first century. Considering extinction as a cultural, artistic, media and biological event, the contributors—both prominent and unusual voices in current debates around the Anthropocene—address the question: What comes after extinction?

After Extinction is a valiant attempt to explore how one ought to live in the face of the impossibility of continuing to live in the way to which one has grown accustomed. As such, this volume is a call to innovation as much as a call to remembrance.

CHOICE

What comes after extinction? Including both prominent and unusual voices in current debates around the Anthropocene, this collection asks authors from diverse backgrounds to address this question. After Extinction looks at the future of humans and nonhumans, exploring how the scale of risk posed by extinction has changed in light of the accelerated networks of the twenty-first century. The collection considers extinction as a cultural, artistic, and media event as well as a biological one. The authors treat extinction in relation to a variety of topics, including disability, human exceptionalism, science-fiction understandings of time and posthistory, photography, the contemporary ecological crisis, the California Condor, systemic racism, Native American traditions, and capitalism.

From discussions of the anticipated sixth extinction to the status of writing, theory, and philosophy after extinction, the contributions of this volume are insightful and innovative, timely and thought provoking.

Contributors: Daryl Baldwin, Miami U; Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State U; William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins U; Ashley Dawson, CUNY Graduate Center; Joseph Masco, U of Chicago; Nicholas Mirzoeff, New York U; Margaret Noodin, U of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Bernard C. Perley, U of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Cary Wolfe, Rice U; Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths, U of London.

Richard Grusin is director of the Center for 21st Century Studies and professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is editor of Anthropocene Feminism (Minnesota, 2017) and The Nonhuman Turn (Minnesota, 2015).

After Extinction is a valiant attempt to explore how one ought to live in the face of the impossibility of continuing to live in the way to which one has grown accustomed. As such, this volume is a call to innovation as much as a call to remembrance.

CHOICE

Contents
Introduction
Richard Grusin
1. Extinction Events and Entangled Humanism
William E. Connolly
2. Planetary Memories: After Extinction, the Imagined Future
Jussi Parikka
3. Photography after Extinction
Joanna Zylinska
4. The Six Extinctions: Visualizing Planetary Ecological Crisis Today
Joseph Masco
5. Condors at the End of the World
Cary Wolfe
6. It’s Not the Anthropocene, It’s the White Supremacy Scene; or, The Geological Color Line
Nicholas Mirzoeff
7. Lives Worth Living: Extinction, Persons, Disability
Claire Colebrook
8. Biocapitalism and De-extinction
Ashley Dawson
9. Surviving the Sixth Extinction: American Indian Strategies for Life in the New World
Daryl Baldwin, Margaret Noodin, and Bernard C. Perley
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index