“Adéu-siau bressol de ma infantesa”: Catalonia and the Anthropocene
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Jacint Verdaguer's poem "Dolça Catalunya" expresses longing—in a Romantic mode—for the valleys, rivers, and mountains he left behind at the end of the nineteenth century while on his way to America. Today, mountains, valleys, trees, along with the words that named them, are not only vanishing from us because of distance. They are progressively vanishing, perhaps forever, due also and foremost to the destructive effects of the Anthropocene. The article explores the effects of the Anthropocene on Catalan language and culture, understanding the latter in its deeply etymological/agricultural sense of "cultivation."
Prosthetic Immortalities
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Prosthetic Immortalities examines the persistence of humans’ aspirations of deathlessness, showing that the link between immortalization and prostheticization is a ubiquitous element of the discourse of immortality. Arguing that the discovery of biological immortals, such as cancer cells and bacteria, present novel conceptual difficulties for traditional philosophical approaches to mortality and selfhood, Adam R. Rosenthal asks whether it is life itself that first births immortalizing prostheses.
Foreword by David Wills
Anthropocene Infrapolitics
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“Since Paul Crutzen suggested the term in 2000, ‘the Anthropocene’ has become established as a narrative frame for the convergence of numerous discourses and collections of data exploring the reach, as well as the limits, of human agency within inherently dynamic Earth processes. This volume of Culture Machine arrives in the wake of a decade-long acceleration of Humanities discourse on the Anthropocene, the radical implications of which remain, in our view, unthought…”
Edited by Pedro Aguilera-Mellado, Peter Baker, Gabriela Méndez-Cota