The Political Theologies of Empire and the Anthropocene

Timothy Mitchell (History) and Mohamad Amer Meziane (Religion).

This project will explore the religious and political dimensions of climate change’s history and theory by focusing particularly on its imperial aspects. It aims at rethinking the narratives of the Anthropocene critically by engaging the colonial dimension of fossil fuel extractions in Asia and Africa with a particular focus on the Middle East, North Africa, and the Sahara. This project is both timely and important to the extent that it proposes to analyze the intertwinement of two central questions of our time: the (re)-politicizations of religion and especially of Islam in postcolonial situations today and the reality of climate change.

Climate change is often dealt with from the perspective of natural science scholars and public policy experts. Deploying a Humanities lens on climate change is nevertheless indispensable for several reasons. First, all theories of the Anthropocene presuppose a historical perspective by which the emergence of climate change can be explained. Second, the very idea of the Anthropocene and the debate it has provoked reactivate a discipline which is the philosophy of history: a reflection on the emergence of modernity at a global level, on its causes but also on the possibility of its end.