The Anthropocene and Visual Culture in Australia

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-032-99772-8
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 322 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 631 g

Australia is gaining a reputation as the proverbial canary in the coal mine of global environmental change. The driest inhabited continent on earth, Australia is now exposed to rising planetary temperatures and an increase in disastrous events such as massive bushfires, floods, and warming oceans. At the same time, urban development, extractive agriculture, and mining are eroding Australia’s distinctive natural habitats, driving its mammal extinctions to the highest rates in the world.

This edited collection features writers from various fields in visual culture, history, and ecocritical theory who give timely accounts of how Australian visual media represents, interprets, predicts, or obscures such environmental events in relation to the Anthropocene. The chapters focus on the visualisation of Australian ecology across a range of media including ancient rock art, television and film, photography, visual art, digital maps, and AI.

By bringing Australian critical perspectives to the challenges of the Anthropocene, this book offers a new environmental approach to Australian culture in the context of the global issues of climate change, extinction, and colonialism.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Postgraduate, and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Williams, Linda

McDonald, Helen

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Kunsttheorie, Kunstphilosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Geschichte der Kunstwissenschaft und Kunstkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Visualising the Anthropocene in Australia SECTION I: ENVISIONING COUNTRY 2. First Peoples’ Visual Culture, Country, and the Anthropocene. Visualising Deep Time: Australian Rock Art, Television and Climate Change 4. Film and Television in the New Age of Fire SECTION II: COLONIAL IMAGERY 5. Presentism and Anthropocenic Unawareness in Early Western Australian Settler Art: The Case of Thomas Turner 6. True History of the Kelly Gang: Shame and Regret- Nostalgia and Anthropocene Aesthetics 7. An Ecological Aesthetic: Kant after Tillers in the Enlightenment to Come SECTION III: WITNESSING EXTINCTION 8. Extinction Imaginaries in Australian Art 9. Animals and the Anthropocene: Saltwater Crocodiles, Malcom Douglas and Australian Television 10. Life’s too short: imagining oceans past, rejecting tuna futures 11. Street Art and Extinction in Cities: intersections between extinction art and shadow places SECTION IV: REFRAMING THE LAND 12. Australian Photography in the Anthropocene 13. Revisioning Regional Australia 14. Attention is All You Want: Machinic Gaze and the Anthropocene 15. Australian Exhibitions and Museums responding to the Anthropocene

Über Autor(innen)

Linda Williams is a cultural historian and Emeritus Professor of RMIT University. She has published widely on histories of human-animal relations and Western concepts of nature. She has curated several international exhibitions on climate change and multispecies imaginaries, and led an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Project Spatial Dialogues: Public Art & Climate Change which produced the co-authored book Screen Ecologies: Art, Screen Culture and the Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region (MIT Press, 2016). She currently leads the Extinction Imaginaries: Mapping Affective Visual Cultures in Australasia ARC project with Saffron Aid and Greenpeace.

Helen McDonald is an art historian and curator, and Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her books are Erotic Ambiguities: The Female Nude in Art (Routledge, 2001) and Patricia Piccinini: Nearly Beloved (2012). Her recent co-edited book is Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art (Routledge, 2023) and her latest co-edited journal special issue is Australian Art and Its Aboriginal Histories, Australian Historical Studies (2023). Her current research interests are rock art and climate change in a global context.