“An innovative, timely, and eminently teachable book, <i>Terracene</i> is part of an exciting new wave of new materialist thought that challenges speciesism, decenters the human, and destabilizes the category of the human altogether. Salar Mameni writes beautifully, weaving memoir and personal vignettes with deep theorizing that demonstrates bright flashes of genius throughout. They bring together the best of critical race, Indigenous, and postcolonial scholarship to bear on the dystopian here and now of climate chaos and terrorized world-making. In short, <i>Terracene</i> is a sensation.” - Ronak K. Kapadia, author of (Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War) “In compelling visual analysis, Salar Mameni shows us how the colonial construction of terror has violently homed in on racialized bodies and environments. Through an aesthetics of revolt forged in opposition to the pincer movement of the inhumane-inhuman, Mameni confronts the weaponization of environments in their narrativization.” - Kathryn Yusoff, author of (A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None)
Part 1. Terracene 11
1. Terror and the Anthropocene 13
2. Anti-Colonial Critique of the Anthropocene 22
3. Provincializing the Anthropocene; or, Why Artists, Feminists, and Yemeni People Have Much to Say about the Cosmos 27
4. The Anthropocene Is a Work of Art 40
5. The Terracene 46
6. Sensing the Terracene 51
7. Crude Aesthetics 70
Part 2. The Sounds of Terracene 81
8. The Class Shattered at My Feet 83
9. Listening to the Terracene 85
10. Shelter 104
11. Silence 106
Part 3. Terran Deities: Oil, Fires, Fevers 111
12. Lamassu 113
13. Huma 126
14. Homa
15. Pazuzu 134
Part 4. Narrative Terrorism 141
16. The Red Star 143
17. Narrative Terrorism 146
Part 5. Crude Aesthetics 161
18. Texas Crude 163
19. A Fire! 171
20. The Devil's Excrement 185
Acknowledgments 189
Notes 193
Bibliography 211
Index 223