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Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities

Thirteen years since the publication of In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006) set the agenda for urban political ecology, we have Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities, a new edited volume that marks new empirical and theoretical terrain for the discipline. Familiar concepts and affinities within urban political ecology remain, such as Marxian political economy, metabolism, and environmental justice, but this volume brings fresh light on how to organize progressive and emancipatory socioecological change. For the authors, this signals a return to the political in both research and practice. As Ernstson and Swyngedouw state, the book “seeks to explicitly engage the relation between emancipatory theory and political activism; in short to bring back the political” (p. 17). In the editors’ introductory essay, they offer their concept of the “Anthropo-obScene” as a tactic to stage and address the depolitizing narratives embedded within the concept of the Anthropocene. Drawing on the etymology of the obscene in Greek theater, their admittedly “stuttering” term is meant to interrupt the “orderly narratives of management, science-based based intervention, and capital” that are currently on stage to “save Earth, people, and the economy as we know it” to showcase the off-staged, or silenced, worldviews that present alternative trajectories to the Anthropocene (p. 6). The AnthropoobScene, in other words, renders the off-staged knowledges and worldviews “visible, sensible, and intelligible” for “for the construction of more equal socio-environments” and “situated, but geographically and culturally interlinked modes of politics” (p. 8). The rest of the book reveals the silenced and off-staged social–ecological realities and possibilities through three interrelated themes: The Political, The Situated, and The Performative. The Political (Part I), is organized around three chapters, which suggest that discourses of the Anthropocene reinforce the depoliticization of our current socioecological moment. Erik Swyngedouw and Henrik Ernstson begin Part I with a chapter that expands on their concept of the Anthropo-obScene, where politics is a performative staging of equality. In Chapter 3, Richard Walker and Jason Moore take a Marxian political economy perspective, which asks not only what capitalism does to nature but what nature does for capitalism. This reading brings attention to how complex geographies of capitalist expansion operate through new frontiers of commodity production and capitalization in order to capture free gifts provided by nature. The final chapter scoping the terrain of The Political engages with postcolonial theory. In their chapter, Andres Henao Castro and Henrik Ernstson, provide three performative moments to interrupt conditions of exclusion in the Anthropocene: the politics of time, the politics of translation, and the politics of the stage. Collectively these chapters mark new theoretical terrain to develop situated and planetary accounts of struggles against exclusion and appropriation. Part II, The Situated, is divided into six chapters. Within this part, the performance of the political is de-centered from urban cores (Keil), embedded in grassroots organizing (Myers), and unearthed in the ghostly presences of urban waste and activism (Armiero). A couple of important theoretical and empirical moves are made across BO O K R EV EW