Worlding beyond ‘the’ ‘end’ of ‘the world’: white apocalyptic visions and BIPOC futurisms

Abstract

We often hear that the ‘end of the world’ is approaching – but whose world, exactly, is expected to end? Over the last several decades, a popular and influential literature has emerged, in international relations (IR), social sciences, and in popular culture, on subjects such as ‘human extinction’, ‘global catastrophic risks’, and eco-apocalypse. Written by scientists, political scientists, and journalists for wide public audiences,1 this genre diagnoses what it considers the most serious global threats and offers strategies to protect the future of ‘humanity’. This article will critically engage this genre to two ends: first, we aim to show that the present apocalyptic narratives embed a series of problematic assumptions which reveal that they are motivated not by a general concern with futures but rather with the task of securing white futures. Second, we seek to highlight how visions drawn from Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) futurisms reimagine more just and vibrant futures.

Political ecology II: Conjunctures, crises, and critical publics

“…Greater attention is given to explore relationality, convivialities with nonhuman nature, and abolition ecology that involves ethics, care, and reparations (Montenegro de Wit, 2021). Narratives of endurance and refusal are invoked to break from a past that fosters white supremacist politics of climate apocalypse (Davis et al, 2017; Whyte, 2020) and instead towards BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) futurisms that provide alternate flourishing (Mitchell and Chaudhury, 2020). Fighting racial capitalism through emancipatory internationalization across differences and borders are proposed in calls for abolition of systems that produce these harms (Heynen and Ybarra, 2021).…”

Imagination and transformations to sustainable and just futures

“…An important component of the interplay between individual and collective imagination concerns the construction of identities, social groups, and the futures preferred by these groups (Anderson, 1983;Beck, 2011;Mitchell and Chaudhury, 2020). Further, if imagination is understood as the capacity to envision both the pathways into different kind of futures and the associated identities of our own desired future selves or future communities, exercising the imagination becomes a source of transformative agency.…”

“…Yet, amid this concern and the various calls to action, creative, robust, and ever-growing imaginations are being generated and articulated, as Anderson and Jones (2015) describe, at the intersection of anti-racism, anti-colonial and feminist movements and scholarship, digital media, metaphysics, speculative futures research, religion, visual studies, performance, art, and the philosophy of science. These works criticize the apocalyptic "end of world" discourses largely driven by white scholarship, arguing that surviving colonialism, slavery, systemic oppression, and more means to have already faced the end of a world (e.g., Whyte, 2018;Mitchell and Chaudhury, 2020). Through a variety of cosmologies and ontological orientations toward the future-not as a mere point along a linear temporal scale-scholars offer imagined alternative ways of being, highlighting the need to transform all that creates injustice and unsustainability in the present (e.g., Wynter, 2003;McKittrick, 2015;Chan, 2016;Montenegro, 2017;Barber, 2018;Whyte, 2018;Ware, 2020).…”

The precipice: Existential risk and the future of humanity, TobyOrd, Hachette Books, New York, NY, 2020. 480 pp. $30.00 (cloth)

“…The Precipice only begins to answer such difficult questions. Since the study of existential risk is both in its infancy and has tended to be dominated by white English‐speaking men—like myself and Ord—there are no doubt serious blind spots in how we conceptualize “humanity” and “existential risk.” As Mitchell and Chaudhury (2020) recently argued,

It is often claimed that the “end of the world” is approaching—but whose world, exactly, is expected to end? … Their central aim is to diagnose the gravest global threats and to offer strategies to protect the future of what they regard as “humanity.” Yet, despite their claims to universality, we argue that these “end of the world” discourses are more specifically concerned about protecting the future of whiteness .

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