This book sets forth a new research agenda for climate theory and aesthetics for the age of the Anthropocene. It explores the challenge of representing and conceptualizing climate in the era of climate change.
In the Anthropocene when geologic conditions and processes are primarily shaped by human activity, climate indicates not only atmospheric forces but the gamut of human activity that shape these forces. It includes the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, the industrial infrastructures and supply chains we build, and together these point to the possible futures we may encounter. This book demonstrates how every weather event constitutes the climatic forces that are as much social, cultural, and economic as they are environmental, natural, and physical. By foregrounding this fundamental insight, it intervenes in the well-established political and scientific discourses of climate change by identifying and exploring emergent aesthetic practices and the conceptual project of mediating the various forces embedded in climate.
This book is the first to sustain a theoretical and analytical engagement with the category of realism in the context of anthropogenic climate change, to capture climate’s capacity to express embedded histories, and to map the formal strategies of representation that have turned climate into cultural content.
Part 1. The Climate of Representation
1. Ecological Postures for a Climate Realism
Amanda Boetzkes
2. Anthropocene Arts: Apocalyptic Realism and the Post-Oil Imaginary in the Niger Delta
Philip Aghoghovwia
3. Fire, Water, Moon: Supplemental Seasons in a Time without Season
Anne-Lise François
Part 2. The Subject of Climate
4. Indigenous Realism and Climate Change
Kyle Powys Whyte
5. Realism’s Phantom Subjects
M. Ty
6. Geologic Realism: On the Beach of Geologic Time
Kathryn Yusoff
Part 3. Realism and the Critique of Climate, or Climate and the Critique of Realism
7. The Poetics of Geopower: Climate Change and the Politics of Representation
Ingrid Diran and Antoine Traisnel
8. Perplexing Realities: Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Humility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of shame. Yet a shared etymology links the words to lowliness and, further down, to the earth. As this study suggests, like the terms in question, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett share an imperfect likeness. Between them is a common interest in states of abjection, shame and suffering – and possible responses to such states. Tracing the relation between negative affect, ethics, and aesthetics, Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism demonstrates how these two major modernists recuperate the affinity between humility and humiliation concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology.
Abbreviations and conventions
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Conclusion: humility’s edges
Bibliography
Index
The increasing lack of discipline in South African schools and the impact thereof is well known. In most instances, existing punitive measures do not yield the required results. Yet, schools continue to scramble to find alternative punishments that will result in a disciplined environment conducive to teaching and learning. Albert Einstein rightly said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.”
This book seeks to provide an alternative approach to discipline. However, to implement this approach, a complete mind-shift is required. This mind set requires an understanding that to discipline learners is to teach socially acceptable behaviour. The restorative approach entails moving away from an approach that merely focuses on the ill-disciplined learner to an approach that focuses on preventing disciplinary problems, changing the culture of the school and restoring the harm done to those affected by the misconduct. The restorative approach involves focusing on finding solutions to address the needs and interests of all the role-players in the school community, rather than finding suitable punishments. Thus, focusing on the best interests of every learner and the interests of educators. Restorative discipline is a value-driven approach that respects the human rights of every stakeholder and also protects, promotes and fulfils everyone’s human rights.
The restorative approach to discipline is explained in detail. The role of every stakeholder in the implementation of this approach also receives attention. The social justice implications are highlighted as well as the impact of discipline on the neurological functioning and development of the child. The book provides practical advice for SGB’s, educators, school social workers and other role-players, such as the Department of Basic Education, on how to implement the restorative approach to discipline. The Constitutional imperatives and the legal framework related to school discipline are also examined. This ground-breaking book will provide guidance for school administrators, practitioners and academics on this innovative school discipline practice.