ANTHROPOCENE TIME

DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

History and Theory 57, no. 1 (2018), 5-32.

Beginning with the question of how a sense of geological time remains strangely withdrawn in contemporary discussions of the Anthropocene in the human sciences and yields place to the more human‐centered time of world history, this article proceeds to discuss the differences between human‐historical time and the time of geology as they relate to the concept of the Anthropocene. The article discusses the difficulty of developing a mode of thinking about the present that would attempt to hold together these two rather different senses of time and ends with a ground‐clearing exercise that might enable the development of such thought.

Cover image: Aerial photograph pf Kenya, by USGS (17 February 2020)