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When the category of the Anthropos is assumed to be universal, it repeats the ‘liberal forgetting’ of modernity as a racial project built upon the affirmation of white progress (Lowe, 2015: 39). This is not to cry foul of stratigraphy, even while acknowledging that the AWG is com- prised overwhelmingly of white men (Raworth, 2014). It is simply to suggest that how we approach the Anthropocene, whether as an object of scientific research or philosophical or political reflection, has significant political consequences. The Anthropocene is not a neutral concept but can either occasion public debate on the histories and legacies of race and racism or it can be used to obscure those very same histories in the service of white public space. Fortunately, a growing conversation seems to be unfolding about the relationship between the Anthropocene and race. This is both welcome and timely. The collection of essays presented in this special issue is therefore of a piece with this expanding volume of work, united in the view that the Anthropocene concept warrants sustained and rigorous analysis through the twinned approaches of critical race theory and decolonial theorisation. Our hope is that these essays will contribute to an expanding critical pedagogy of the Anthropocene, whether conceived as decolonial (Davis and Todd, 2017; Todd, 2015), anti-racist (Pulido, 2018; Verges, 2017), or feminist (Grusin, 2017; Haraway, 2015). One of the key commonalities running across the articles that comprise this special issue is that each contributes to this pedagogy by interrogating, in broad ways, the construction of whiteness through the Anthropocene. While it is clear that the Anthropocene is certainly not a simple practice of colonial environmentalism, these contributions clarify the ways in which whiteness is fundamental to how the Anthropocene has been articulated in many instances. First, they help us to appreciate how the Anthropocene can be conceptualised as a naming event arising in response to a distinctly white, or at least European, ontological crisis – the end of the human, the end of history, or what Isabelle Stengers (2015: 43) has called the ‘intrusion of Gaia’. In this sense, these contributions direct us to understand the Anthropocene as a situated attempt to repossess Earth through naming amid the very undoing of whiteness. And second, as Todd (2015) argues, the Anthropocene is a naming event unfolding within a genre of white epistemology; only when scrubbed clean of its particularity does the Anthropocene acquire its unmarked universality. The trouble, how- ever, and this is Todd’s point, is that even as a growing number of scholars in the humanities and interpretative social sciences decentre the Anthropocene’s white androcentrism, the Anthropocene remains a white public space. Its whiteness determines not only who can be heard in that space but also the very terms on which the Anthropocene debate unfolds as an object of public concern. For example, the Anthropocene now dominates how the con- temporary planetary crisis is conceptualised. Yet it does so by prioritising the methods and the institutions of stratigraphy and Earth system science, while subordinating other epis- temologies that would narrate the environmental crisis through a different set of histories, politics, and territorialities. At this point, as editors of this collection, it is worth acknowledging our whiteness, as we are both directly implicated in the very dynamics Todd illuminates. We both work in Anglo institutions in the West and benefit regularly from white privilege, even at that same time as we work to question and decentre white privilege as an onto-epistemic structure. Our aim in bringing scholars together to think through race, whiteness, and the Anthropocene has been not simply to illustrate the importance of whiteness to the oncoming crises, but to mobilise the critique of whiteness in order to insist upon the need for a space more conducive for the telling of other stories and for other storytellers. Unless whiteness is recognised not as an identity but as an onto-epistemic structure that limits the diverse ontologies and material- ities of our worlds, then it will simply end up being reified as the problem of our time: ‘for ever and ever, amen’. This is certainly far from the case, yet the institutional structures from which the Anthropocene discourse emanates and the diversity of those working within them leaves much to be desired. Implicated as we, as white, Anglo, male academics, are, our goal is to promote the conditions through which whiteness can be seen as a condition to be overcome, not a fact of nature. Indeed, looking at the broader geopolitical struggles that are unfolding alongside the Anthropocene and its discourse we also see very different, non- white, forms of ethno-nationalisms rising across the globe. These are similarly intertwined with the rapacious growth of capitalism and the seemingly endless accumulation of land and wealth at the expense of peoples and ecologies that are the signs of the Anthropocene (cf. Gergan, 2017; Sze, 2015). This is to say that even while the Anthropocene is a white concept, its material dimensions are not wholly reducible to whiteness, and thus demand a politics that sees the Anthropocene as a broadly racialised landscape. Whiteness is also often assumed to be part of a binary with blackness (Moreton- Robinson, 2015). This conception, however, simplifies the production of race and creates hierarchies of difference. The articles in this special issue attempt to move beyond this binary, by highlighting how whiteness does not simply designate a subject position but is bound up with ontology that produces race as a central feature of the ‘human’ (Sheshadri-Crooks, 2002). From that perspective, one danger held by Anthropocene dis- course is that whiteness is projected unconsciously as the universal source of global impacts. In reading the Anthropocene (as naming, discourse and activism) as an outcome of the ‘overarching political, economic, and social system of domination’ (Diangelo, 2018: 28) of whiteness, we hope not to re-inscribe whiteness into the future, but to show the cracks in this rhetoric to enable the possibility of other stories coming out. In rethinking the Anthropocene, it is our hope that these can lead to spaces for other histories – and futures – to be told, work that is indeed already happening (Karera, 2019; Todd, 2015). The focus on narrative here is important. Narrative is precisely that which gives knowl- edge its meaning. Abstract concepts like the Anthropocene must be narrated in order to be comprehensible; narrative is partly what allows these concepts to resonate with their audiences. In the absence of a compelling narrative, such concepts become meaningless. This is especially so for concepts like the Anthropocene, which acquire their public signif- icance precisely because they resonate meaningfully with various publics. If the Anthropocene is to impel a transformation of values it can only do so if comprehensible to the widest possible audience. And it is here, once again, that race and racism become of fundamental importance. This is because, as Stuart Hall (2017: 33) once described it, ‘hate- ful as racism may be as a historical fact, it is nevertheless also a system of meaning’. In other words, racism is a very powerful means by which the world is rendered meaningful. It invents ‘race’ as part of a classificatory schema, which only then does it use to retroac- tively ‘translat[e] historically specific structures into the timeless language of nature’ (Hall, 1980: 342). The special issue The papers in this special issue clearly reveal how the Anthropocene is not immune from the process of racialisation. In fact, they make very clear that narratives of the Anthropocene are themselves racial narratives. Taken together they contribute to ensuring that the dis- course of the Anthropocene does not ignore the question of race, difference, and exclusion, while still recognising the material changes that usher in concern for a new geological epoch. In opposition to the Anthropocene, geographers like Andreas Malm and Jason Moore have championed the Capitalocene to reflect the underlying economic order that has enabled the geological changes of the past five centuries. In his contribution, Arun Saldanha agrees that capitalism is the key agent behind contemporary environmental destruction, but argues that not identifying this economic order as a racial order misses the overall story. Not only was geological change established by an economic system that pushed cheap frontiers, but the racial capitalism that made this possible categorised con- tingently distinguishable bodies and positioned them differently with the geological changes. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, Saldanha suggests that the start of the Anthropocene, if it is to have any radical potential, must be established not just on the rise of capitalism, or the use of fossil fuels, but with the enshrinement of race as a fundamental vector of capitalism, which he argues was established in the late 18th century Sugar plantations, Joshua Eichen argues, were a central spatial technique that produced the racialised Capitalocene. In a detailed analysis of the dense web of relations of slavery, deforestation, Atlantic crossings, economic exchanges, and brutality, Eichen shows how fundamental the practice of slavery and sugar production was to the patterns of the pro- posed Anthropocene. This uneven economic order unravels the simplicity of the Anthropocene’s claims of a universal human footprint on the geological record.