Introduction

Abstract

The Introduction argues that the ‘Anthropocene’ and critiques of it rely on a geo-logic of the ‘cene’ that strands those seeking a different spatial future in the very logic to be un-done. We introduce a transdisciplinary framework, the Black Outdoors, to center attention on the circuitries of Black life-making that have continually emerged in contexts of racialized death. The text is divided into four parts. One addresses the spatial difference that ontology makes. It begins by examining the relational ontology of subSaharan Africa and how transAtlantic slavery transferred and expanded on it in the ‘new world.’ Capitalism and Marxian theories of capitalism are shown to be equally constrained in fathoming relationality’s revolutionary potential. ‘Two’ addresses how survival is premised on reckoning with Black and indigenous pasts and honoring Black knowledges and worldmaking systems. ‘Three’ interrogates how the territorial state and technology-accelerated, late-finance capitalism, mediate spatial futures in the present planetary emergency. ‘Four’ builds on science fiction’s audaciously creative powers of speculation to take the measure of the Anthropocene-in-crisis and its transmutation to different imagined post-Anthropocenes. In these fictional spacetimes, “Anthropos”—the human dimension—would be further defined and conditioned by its creative and destructive relationship to science and thinking machines.