Susan Reid

Jennifer Mae Hamilton

Pia Van Gelder

If the Anthropocene heralds both a new age of human supremacy and an out-of-control Nature ushering in a premature apocalypse, this living book insists such assumptions must be hacked. Re-performing selections from two live events staged in 2016, 2017 and 2018 in Sydney, Australia, Hacking the Anthropocene offers a series of propositions - argument, augury, poetry, elegy, essay, image, video - that suggest alternative entry points for understanding shifting relationships between humans and nature. Scholars and artists from environmental humanities and related areas of social, political and cultural studies interrogate the assumption of the human "we" as a uniform actor, and offer a timely reminder of the entanglements of race, sexuality, gender, coloniality, class, and species in all of our earthly terraformings. Here, Anthropocene politics are both urgent and playful, and the personal is also planetary.

Feminist, Queer, Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene

From providential apocalypticism to climate change, this ground-breaking ecocritical study traces the performance history of the storm scene in King Lear to explore our shifting, fraught and deeply ideological relationship with stormy weather across time. This Contentious Storm offers a new ecocritical reading of Shakespeare's classic play, illustrating how the storm has been read as a sign of the providential, cosmological, meteorological, psychological, neurological, emotional, political, sublime, maternal, feminine, heroic and chaotic at different points in history. The big ecocritical history charted here reveals the unstable significance of the weather and mobilises details of the play's dramatic narrative to figure the weather as a force within self, society and planet.

This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear

Introduction: the case for King Lear -- Ecocriticism. Meteorological reading -- "What is the cause of thunder?": the storm's three ambiguities -- Cataclysmic shame: three views of Lear's mortal body in the storm -- Performance history. Ecocritical big history -- The spectacular Jacobean theatre -- Storms of fortune: industrial technology and Nahum Tate, c.1680-c.1900 -- Lear's head: the rise of the psychological metaphor, 1908-1955 -- Towards the flood, 1962-2016 -- Epilogue: the art of necessity

Jennifer Mae Hamilton

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