&NOW 2018

In catastrophic times, new collectivies emerge & respond. The issue of intervention into the dominant and destructive narratives of progress that rule our age is taken up in Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, where she envisions collaboration as a means of reimagining and remaking the future. Her emphasis on biological resurgence compels us to consider how we might reorganize our own social processes – as writers, as collectivities of (re)writers, and as writers-with – to generate new meanings and actions, to shift the narrative and its frames. This reading presents participants in Counter-Desecration: a Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan UP, 2018), a collaborative intervention that responds to the need to critically and creatively inhabit our new political and ecological realities. The contributors’ words – 135 common terms, repurposed words, and neologisms – map new perspectives that together provide ways to approach the interlinked social, economic, and environmental forces that shape us, the places we live, and our relationship to them, to each other, and to other species. As Allison Adelle Hedge Coke writes in her Preface, “Counter-Desecration brings sustenance and power with terms made in collective remedying.” What makes Counter-Desecration unique among contemporary anthropocene glossary projects is the brevity of the entries (each no more than 200 words) and the diversity of their forms (narratives, poems, lists, manifestoes, meditations, and microessays).