Interlude: Big Stories
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Published:January 2025
The chapter focuses on political imaginations expressed in contemporary debates about the Anthropocene to characterize the modern collective and its ongoing transformations. Discussions about the Anthropocene form three clusters: the consensus narratives (associated with government agencies and the agenda of decarbonization), the dissensus narratives (associated with denunciations that consensus narratives do not address the “real” problem and seek to protect the status quo), and the compositionist narratives (arguing that the other two clusters, limited by their modernist ontoepistemic framework, fail to grasp that the irruption of nonhuman agencies into politics is what defines the Anthropocene). Read through Latin American discussions of lo común (the common), Anthropocene narratives reveal that, in scalar terms, standing political imaginaries are generally oriented toward displacement and “the big.”