SERIES
Introduction:
Welcome to the Ceneocene
by Abigail Bleach and Cydney Phillip
28 August 2025
We are living through a time of cascading and cumulative crises, from global warming and biodiversity loss to food scarcity and humanitarian disaster. But, in this era of ecological catastrophe, it is not only crises that are proliferating: so too are -cenes. There is of course the Anthropocene, but also the Plantationocene, the Capitalocene, the Wasteocene, the Agrocene, even the Homogenocene. Each of these terms represents an attempt to delineate ‘the present’ – the long eco/geological moment in which humans have exerted such destructive force on the planet as to profoundly reshape its biotic and climatological systems. Did this warping begin with the Transatlantic Slave Trade? Or at the point when artificial radioactive isotopes left their first trace in the geological record? Or perhaps its origins predate history itself, stretching back to the Neolithic era and the advent of agriculture.
All of this is to say that the Anthropocene and the cluster of -cenes that surround it have reconfigured human history, forcing us to reorient ourselves in relation to past “inflection points of consequence” that continue to shape the planetary future1. Discussions of this reconfiguration have the potential to be either illuminating or reductive. In its crudest fors, -cene discourse produces oversimplified causal arguments that aim to trace a straight line from a particular moment in history to the ecological emergencies of the present. Viewed another way, however, the Anthropocene brings into contact divergent moments in history, prompting us to consider the relationships between medieval migrations and the contemporary migrant crisis, the plantation and Hurricane Katrina, the bombing of Hiroshima and the imagined future ‘tipping point’ that will render the Earth uninhabitable.
Vernacular -cenes
In this tangled timescape, the language of stratigraphy – of one epoch followed by and clearly delineated from another – is revealed to be insufficient. As such, this special issue sets out to explore alternative modes of expression that might better capture the changing shape of planetary history.
To this end, we propose the concept of ‘Anthropocene vernaculars’. While the Anthropocene offers a nominally objective “view from nowhere” (Yusoff 2018), we turn to vernacular modes of expression to gain a more granular understanding of the ways in which ecological change and emergency are experienced across space, place, and time, and the manifold, often incongruous ecological histories that these experiences produce. We are intrigued by the idea that while ‘vernacular’ is usually understood to be a language rooted in a particular place, vernacular modes of expression might also arise out of particular times, as a means of reckoning with the strangely interconnected environmental histories that are now coming into focus.
Our position is aligned with recent scholarship that contests the ways in which dominant chronologies of the Anthropocene bypass long standing social and economic asymmetries and narrate human history exclusively from the perspective of the Western “Anthropos”. We contend that if the overarching concept of the Anthropocene risks exerting a totalising effect on the span of history contained within it, then the vernaculars now emerging attest to a far more complex and knotty relationship between the planetary past, present, and future.
Charting Vernacular Histories
We invited contributors to interpret the term ‘vernacular’ broadly, beyond literal vernaculars, to refer to unofficial, localised/regional, or pulp/pop responses to and formulations of ecological emergencies. The responses they generated invite us to dwell outside of dominant narratives of the Anthropocene by engaging with Indigenous naming practices, paying attention to racialised patterns of breath(lessness), becoming attuned to the communicative capacities of stone, and listening to river-borne murmurs and memories. The essays contained in this series vary in form, focus, and method, but they all share an openness to the ways in which networks of unofficial, embodied, more-than-human, and local ways of knowing disrupt, reshape, and deepen our understanding of ecological time and anthropogenic change.
We begin with John Sabapathy’s “Koutarcano – An Exercise in the Historic Present”, which excavates the histories of Crawford Lake, Ontario – a site of unique significance both for Canada and for the Anthropocene. Written in an experimental present-tense historical voice, Sabapathy does away with stratification, allowing fragments of Koutarcano’s Indigenous, colonial, and scientific pasts to coalesce in the present. It is a piece preoccupied with names and naming, repeatedly calling attention to the ways in which history and science are shaped (and, often, obscured) by language; as such, it works to resist the homogenising tendencies of Western Anthropocene thinking without ever fully escaping its confines.
Kelechi Anucha turns our attention to the embodied temporalities of the Anthropocene and explores how individual respiration is linked to the deep-time dynamics of atmospheric change. Drawing on poetic invocations of breath and breathlessness, Anucha attends to the ways in which these entanglements are experienced across racial axes, while also exploring the affective registers of Black British and Black American poems of respiration. In doing so, Anucha posits that these works share an “emotional vernacular – a common language – in which multiple temporalities can co-exist.”
Thinking beyond verbal vernaculars, Giulia Magro prompts us to consider how vernacular materials, such as stone, communicate the asynchronicities of the Anthropocene and, in doing so, undermine linear narratives of progress. Through a close reading of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), Magro explores how the novel mediates multiple human and nonhuman vernaculars that unfold at differing scales and paces, gesturing to the allochronic dimensions of the Anthropocene and challenging notions of temporal homogeneity.
The medieval again surfaces in Rebecca Drake’s contribution, a creative–critical ‘composite text’ that is geographically anchored in York but spans a thousand years of environmental history. Beginning with the question of what the grainy vernacular of the River Ouse might look and sound like, Drake constructs a unique poetic lexicon made up of fragments of Middle English and Old Norse narratives, as well as recent scientific textbooks. Drake’s poems transform the smooth flow of the river into something far muddier, revealing it to be crowded not only with plankton and silt, but also centuries’ worth of accumulated memory, waste, and want.
Taken together, these essays help us to see the connections between medieval and contemporary apocalypses, histories of colonial violence and ongoing crises of global air pollution, nuclear technology and the construction of narrative. They are informative, shedding new light on particular moments in planetary history – yet, at the same time, they leave troubling gaps, raising as many questions as they answer. Anucha and Magro’s moving textual analyses both convey the power of literature to expose injustice – but they also raise the unsettling possibility that these interventions may come too late, after certain worlds (and the people who inhabit them) have already been eradicated. Meanwhile, in their formally challenging pieces, Drake and Sabapathy preclude the possibility of total comprehension: caught between multiple historic and current vernacular languages, the reader must accept and try to work with a certain degree of alienation.
We invite you, as Haraway would have it, to “stay with the trouble” that these pieces generate – and to fill in the gaps and draw connections with other pivotal moments through history. We hope that, together, we can generate a shared vernacular that might help us to reckon with our past and create a way forward.
ABIGAIL BLEACH and CYDNEY PHILLIP were IAS Quirk Postdoctoral Fellows in Languages of the Anthropocene in 2023-24. Together they co-convened the Languages of the Anthropocene research cluster which facilitated explorations of how language and narrative represent, negotiate, and reshape more-than-human ecologies in times of emergency.
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Proofread by NICHOLAS LACKENBY
Lead image (detail) by Karsten Winegeart
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