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Clara de Massol de Rebetz: Remembering the Anthropocene
On March 13th, Clara de Massol de Rebetz joined us for a reading group on eco-memory to talk about her book Remembering the Anthropocene: Memorials Beyond the Human (2023). Clara is a lecturer and researcher in memory studies and environmental humanities based at King’s College London. Her research, grounded in cultural and literary studies, explores artistic, cultural and institutional memory forms and practices through posthuman and postcolonial lenses to address the fraught relationships between colonial practices, extractivism, and institutional memory politics.
Remembering the Anthropocene: Memorials Beyond the Human defines and apprehends the developing field of environmental memory studies and reflects on the possibilities, challenges, prospects and limitations of culturally remembering (in) the Anthropocene. The book surveys a series of Anthropocene-related memorials. This leads to an examination of different memory agents across histories – past, present and future, interacting as to facilitate an investigation of memorialization politics under new ecological regimes, within and beyond the human.
After the reading group discussion, Clara gave a lecture on her work, which we had co-organized in collaboration with the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies and the Network for Environmental Humanities. Clara’s lecture was astute and thought-provoking, leading to a lively discussion with the audience afterwards, which was moderated by Ifor Duncan.
We are thankful for Clara’s generous contribution to our discussion and her fascinating lecture. Her work inspires the project to consider how memory in the Anthropocene “might then start with the human but might also end without it”.
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