From Empire to Anthropocene: The Novel in Posthistorical Times by Betty Joseph (review)

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Reviewed by:

• From Empire to Anthropocene: The Novel in Posthistorical Times by Betty Joseph
• Anne Stewart

JOSEPH, BETTY. From Empire to Anthropocene: The Novel in Posthistorical Times. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. 235 pp. $114.95 hardcover; $34.95 paperback; $34.95 e-book.

Betty Joseph's From Empire to Anthropocene is driven by a provocative premise: literary and critical theory, particularly as it is engaged with questions of globality and globalization, pays a lot of attention to space, but what if we paid more attention to time? Joseph's introduction makes a case for a critical reorientation toward temporal axes: in a present moment marked by geopolitical and ecological strife, what we encounter again and again are contests over not so much what time it is, but whose time? Joseph calls this the force of "chronopolitics," captured in rhetorical contests such as those embedded in the Trump campaign slogan: "Make America Great Again" (for whom? since when?), and in the race to slow the Covid-19 pandemic (the speed of the virus a temporality at odds with the speed of global flows). Joseph identifies contests over temporality as increasingly definitive of a ruptured or "uneven" contemporaneity that challenges conceptions of globality and of how we understand contemporary literature. What timeline is this? To whom does it belong? To whom (and to when) does the future belong? The project asks readers to think about how novelistic narration of lived experience cuts across multiple different timelines, presenting "a conflict over time" (151) that challenges theorists with perhaps greater questions of unevenness than those already offered by geo-critical theories of the spatial.

The book's title, which does not mention globalization or temporality, can best be understood as tracking our shifting understandings of globalization, first as the expansion of colonial empires and the creation of a capitalist world system, and then as a world remade [End Page 327] two times over into a problem of planetarity posed by anthropogenic climate change. Across five chapters, Joseph takes us from postcolonialist considerations of "migrant temporality" (57), to retheorizations of Manuel Castells's network society and the neoliberal global marketplace via the "bumps, delays, and lags" that trouble the smooth operations of global flows (97), and finally to the time of global environmental crisis. Each chapter is theoretically dense as it takes up a different complex of temporalities, critical concepts, and rhetorical figures used by the novels under investigation. The final chapter, for example, looks at the temporality of environmental change as it operates through the assemblages found in the proleptic descriptive work in Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior. What is produced through such a reading practice, Joseph argues, is a "temporality of uncertainty" (195) that offers the reader a sense of agency in imagining futures not necessarily doomed by climate change but opening up into the very possibilities of difference produced by the contingencies and uncertainties of climate crisis timelines.

The progression of the argument from Empire to Anthropocene also moves from considerations of the ways in which the past, to evoke Faulkner's famous line, is not even past, to the ways in which the future is pulled into the present by the time-annihilating force of market speculation. The first two chapters, "Spectres" and "Attachments," address Joseph's opening assertion that "the rich body of transnational Anglophone fiction…reorients contemporary literature" (5) by bringing "the durabilities of the colonial past in(to) the present" (30). Through readings of the historical and affective temporalities in Jamaica Kinkaid's Lucy and Teju Cole's Open City, Joseph considers the pressures that such timelines place on being (in the) present and on conceptions of national time and familial and civic belonging. Scholars of the transatlantic slave trade and the legacy of Indigenous genocide in the Americas will find much that is familiar here on the force of history as it shapes politico-national and spatial orders. The strength of Joseph's theoretical gambit comes across most persuasively through the addition of temporal layering to the spatial palimpsests that are typically found in readings of urban fiction such as Open City, offering a fresh understanding of migrant subjectivity shaped by "heterotemporalities" "crowding each other...