CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Franklin Ginn Recomposing Anthropos: Figures for a Future Epoch
Recomposing Anthropos aims to develop a renewed, creaturely sense of the figure of "Man." Resurgent fascisms of white male power currently vie with critical theories and identitarian politics in trying to reformulate what it is to be human and, specifically, what it is to be "man." These options have pushed "man" toward liberal allyship or toxic extremisms. The project proposes a new way forward through a difficult rehabilitation of the figure of "man" from the aftermath of powerful decolonial, Black, Indigenous, and other critiques. This book project seeks to salvage something from anthropos/man, arguing that we need to find ways to live with this ruined and ruinous figure. The book is neither a defense of "man" nor an apology for his crimes. Drawing on posthumanism, the decolonial spatial theories of Édouard Glissant, queer theory, and plant studies, the project tells fables of male figures that expand epochal ideas of the Human. Each fable is also emplaced in a particular scene (in Scotland, Pakistan, Hawaii, Madagascar, and China) that builds toward a sense of planetary place. This project advocates for an archipelagic sense of planetary place and a new imagination of the figure of the Anthropos.