Retheorising climate justice for the Anthropocene: a comparative study of activist movements in South Africa and the UK.

This research proposes to both reassess and augment the potential of climate justice (CJ) as an innovative political and epistemic intervention in the age of the Anthropocene. The CJ movement is vocal in underscoring how the burden of climate change is borne by those least responsible for it, but otherwise the scope of its claims - political and epistemic - is limited. To this end, this project traces a genealogy of CJ narratives through an institutional ethnography of environmental organisations in South Africa and the UK. This will form the empirical basis for a fresh theoretical endeavour: the initiation of a tripartite dialogue between CJ narratives, postcolonial theory and speculative realism. This ambitious scope reflects the complexity of these emerging debates. Employing the insights of postcolonial criticism, it will contend that climate justice narratives are latently Eurocentric in that they universalise and fail to interrogate culturally specific notions of the human subject, its agency, and its interactions with the nonhuman. Additionally, it will examine the enormous challenge the Anthropocene poses to postcolonial thought, as well as to the 'postcolonial-postmodern' figure of the human upon which this mode of critique relies. These tensions are further compounded by the recently reinvigorated philosophies of speculative realism and Object-Oriented-Inquiry. In their de-emphasis of the human subject and re-imagining of the human-nonhuman interface, I aim to understand whether and how these could pay dividends in helping both climate justice and postcolonial critique overcome their internal contradictions and augment their political claims.