The Poetics of Settler Fatalism: Responses to Ecocide from within the Anthropocene
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is impossible to think today, without thinking of the Anthropocene. As biospheres are pushed ever-closer towards exhaustion, collapse, and/or radically inhospitable transmutations, there is a simultaneous explosion of work striving to represent and understand this epoch. However, the Anthropocene should not be thought in isolation from other social, political, and ecological processes. In this paper, I investigate the Anthropocene’s intersection with settler colonialism. Of particular interest to this paper are the metaphorical and narrative accounts about wastelanded spaces; that is, how meaning is ascribed to the local manifests of the Anthropocene as they are birthed on colonized territories. I ask what sort of futurities or recuperations are imagined as extant within the Anthropocene; in particular, whether possibilities for anti-colonial futures are imagined as existing within or emerging from wastelanded spaces. I investigate Richard-Yves Sitoski’s (settler) brownfields. In this intensely located book of poetry—which Sitoski describes as a “poetic ‘autogeography” of Owen Sound”—identifying the presence of what I call settler fatalism in the face of the Anthropocene and its attendant brownfields. I suggest this fatalism is brought about by a melancholic attachment to the processes of wastelanding that are endemic to settler colonization. The final section of this paper contrasts the settler fatalism of Sitoski with the still ambivalent, though more generative poetry of Liz Howard (Ashinaabek). I suggest that Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent approaches the Anthropocene not as a terminal epoch, but as what Donna Haraway calls “a boundary event”.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.075 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".