A question is posed by the conceivers of this Course: How can the disastrous effects of the Anthropocene be justly mitigated in a way that takes a multitude of concerns into consideration rather than falling back into the tropes of hegemony and violence? Then more questions follow: But who gets to decide how and what and when to act? Do certain views or values win out? How does this collective problem not turn into yet another struggle of oppression, silencing some voices to the benefit of the most forceful? And now we arrive at the central question: Can a consensus ever be built on the topic under the current circumstances, given that we remain besieged by processes and protocols that are marred by past and present silencing and oppression?2.1.1

To answer this question, we must not only look at who the decisive actors in consensus building are, their tools, or the conditions that allowed the creation of these tools and what lies behind their use.

We also need to look at those who have been excluded from such processes, along with their eliminated tools, and the conditions that brought about this exclusion, this silencing.

So we immediately arrive at colonialism. In his 1950 book Discourse on Colonialism,2.1.2 Aimé Césaire summarizes such exclusion pointedly. Under colonization, Césaire describes, “societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.”

The elimination of tools that engender silencing brings us to the forced lack of a language that may facilitate someone’s admission to the process of consensus building. Saidiya Hartman, in her essay “Venus in Two Acts” (2008),2.1.3 examines writing at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown, as she recalls the violence of the archive and the conditions that dictate the silences of the enslaved, for instance. If these silences are considered as an effect of colonization, slavery, and genocide, then questions about the types of language and linguistic tools and forms that are missing from the process of consensus building must be asked—not only questions about who does not get to have a say in it.

Equally, it is necessary to listen closely to what has survived the silencing and oppression that have marked the past few centuries that gave rise to the Anthropocene; to hear the poetic knowledge that is born in the “great silence” of scientific knowledge, as Césaire puts it in Poetry and Knowledge (1990).2.1.4 This silence can be traced in the exclusion of other types of knowledge, tools, and elements and in their silencing through being deemed irrelevant in a scientific process. While knowledge construction itself can be quite a noisy affair, much of the evidence of consensus relies on the “silent majority.”

In her literary and film work, Assia Djebbar explores the kinds of knowledge and language that have been silenced, undermined, and eliminated from the archive. Nevertheless, her work traces how they still exist and can articulate a different kind of narrative, one that escapes the colonizers’ tools of silencing. For her film الزردة وأغاني النسيان (The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting, 1982),2.1.5 Djebbar sifted through archive footage recorded by French colonialists in the Maghreb in the early twentieth century, including scenes of Zerda ceremonies, which honor a local spiritual figure. The footage depicts scenes of “a daily life held in contempt” by the colonizer in order to subvert the colonial gaze and build an alternative portrait of Maghrebi people during a period of struggle and resistance. The scenes are accompanied by a soundtrack of poetry and song that address questions of language, the violence of French colonialization, the exoticization and erasure of local practices, and the complexities of remembering through and against the colonial archive.

The humiliating and undignified way colonial imagery depicts the colonized is intended to establish the normalcy of excluding the colonized from any consensus building in the making. As the colonized are depicted as being fascinated and bewildered by the power of the colonizers and their ability to change, create and invent, the colonized may choose the silence of awe. But what remains unsilenced is poetry and song. Could poetry and song, along with other contemporary vernacular modes of communication, be adopted as tools in the process of consensus building in the Anthropocene, assuming the latter is tied up with colonialism?

Capitalism gave rise to colonialism, which has mutated into neoliberalism activated by local and global forces as they unite toward a global profit. Jinnah Avenue (2017),2.1.6 a short film by Zahra Malkani and Shahana Rajani, explores, for instance, the politics and visuality of road infrastructure in Gadap, an area adjacent to Karachi, where the real-estate development of Bahria Town is unfolding, transforming over 35,000 acres of agricultural land into a gated neighborhood expected to house 1 million residents. The film traces the violence of infrastructure on the Earth, ecology, and communities to make visible the ways in which these practices are engineering new forms of erasure, disconnection, and dispossession. The silencing continues against humans, plants, animals, and the land. But this time the erasure also extends to the attempt to record it: when the camera is not allowed on site and must be hidden, a new type of imagery—a non-surveilling gaze—emerges.

How can an awareness of the Anthropocene bring an awareness of the need for plurality and mutual care? How to overcome this lack of pluralism that results from power imbalances and differences in the tools of articulation and knowledge formation in consensus building?

It is inevitable to turn to the language of those who have suffered the effects of the Anthropocene, and not only to the language of those who have been causing it. Listening to the words of Chiefs Albert Naquin and Shirell Parfait-Dardar and Elder Rosina Philippe,2.1.7 for example, allows us to depart from the opposition between the human and more-than-human, a first step toward necessary plurality and mutual care.

In his book The Rahui: Legal Pluralism in Polynesian Traditional Management of Resources and Territories (2016),2.1.8 anthropologist Tamatoa Bambridge offers us the chance to understand and treat consensus building as a process instead of a static system of rules, involving noncentralized parties, by considering its application in the Pacific Islands. The rahui—a concept that prohibits access to resources and territories on spiritual grounds—emerges as a process that bypasses the centralization of power. It manifests “the interrelationship between environmental guardianship and consent-based political power across Eastern Polynesian indigenous societies … in ways that are … intellectually revolutionary” (p. x). The “rahui have been at the heart of environmental management and consensus-based social relations for generations across Eastern Polynesia” (p. xi). Such an approach stands in stark contrast to the experience of those who live along the Kuils River2.1.9 in Cape Town and continue to endure the disastrous effects of water- management practices they have little to no say in.

Adopting a rahui-like process in consensus building can allow plurality to exist within and beyond centralized powers, as it continues to enable sets of rules and processes to emerge between groups that might differ from one another, in status and power. A rahui-like process would allow, for instance, a place for a poet alongside a scientist alongside an animal. In sum, it would create a process of consensus building that accounts for varied means of experience and seeks to find a common ground for future knowledges and practices.

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In the key contribution that accompanies this pathway, Simon Turner considers the (ongoing) evolution of the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, which—if a consensus can be found between scientists and researchers—could soon be updated to display the geological boundary of the new epoch of the Anthropocene. How different might the chart look today had plurality held more sway in the past, Turner asks, and what modes of consensus might shape it going forward?