"The Moderns' Amnesia in Two Registers"

Collard, Rosemary-Claire, Jessica Dempsey and Juanita Sundberg | from Multimedia Library Collection:
Periodicals

Collard, Rosemary-Claire, Jessica Dempsey and Juanita Sundberg. “The Moderns’ Amnesia in Two Registers.” Environmental Humanities 7, no. 1 (2016): 227-32. doi:10.1215/22011919-3616425.

“The West is living in a triumphant euphoria.” So wrote the celebrated late Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano. This euphoria, he explains, is blind to its foundations: past and ongoing violence, tragedy, poverty, and suffering—inequity that is rife not only elsewhere, but also within the West’s richest countries. In an announcement of Galeano’s death in the Buenos Aires Herald, he is quoted as having described himself as “obsessed with remembering” in a “land condemned to amnesia.” Amnesia. If there is a singular trait to describe An Ecomodernist Manifesto, this is it. Amnesia. In two registers. First, amnesia about the deeply uneven and violent nature of modernization. And second, about the struggles that have underpinned every effort to alleviate inequality and violence. (Authors’ introduction)

© Rosemary-Claire Collard, Jessica Dempsey and Juanita Sundberg 2016. Environmental Humanities is available online only and is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).