Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures) Paperback – September 19, 2016

Donna Haraway's work has always fascinated me, and this recent piece on how we can find new ways to encounter and live, grow, and die with other "peoples" (in the broadest sense of the term) is just as vital to my thinking today as Simians, Cyborgs, and Women was at the start of my academic career. Haraway's goal- to find ways of "making oddkin," refusing to take a technological, lazy optimist view of the future nor subscribe to nihilist futilism at what has already occurred, suggests we find ways to reach out in all the myriad creative, intersectional approaches we can muster.The first half of the book is very dense, where Haraway lays out how she intends to connect her SF practices with attention to other "critters" in the world as the Sixth Great Extinction is already steam-rolling species diversity, habitats, and affecting marginalized, indigenous, and impoverished peoples most. Her idea that we need a new term for this epochal shift- rather than Anthropocene or Capitalocene- instead goes back to "chthonic" others- spiders, pigeons, fungi, and other creatures usually relegated to the compost bins of human attention. She turns instead away from post-humanist language to com-positions, staying together with the trouble.I loved the second half of Haraway's book, as the chapters are short, full of loving craft, and bring out her ideas in novel ways that aren't usually seen in academic writing. Her last section about the Camillas is a storytelling encapsulation of the rest of her book. It's a fun read on its own, but you might need the other 7 chapters to understand what she means.

Haraway puts her unique blend of virtuosic wordplay and broad humanistic and scientific understanding into the service of helping us think about the contemporary state of the world in constructive ways. This is about not dismissing climate change and other huge threats because we can do nothing about them, and also not imagining we have the power to "fix" them, but embracing this moment because it is all that we have, and life is worth it. The constant repetitions of certain phrases and images can be irritating, until you see this as a sort of poem or performance piece that is trying to keep you in the present moment while connecting you to ideas, people, places, and especially species you had never felt kinship to before.

Climate change and the onset of the Anthropocene, or Cthulucene as Haraway prefers to call it, calls for new ways of being and different stories to the ones we've been telling each other. Rather than an individualistic, capital M Man story, we need earthier, more entangled stories that will guide us in tough decisions about who lives and who dies, for whom we are and are not responsible in a finite world. This is a book about avoiding two mental places that are not helpful: denial on one hand or "game over" on the other. Instead, we need to stay with this trouble, and Haraway provides a lively philosophy for doing that.

I wouldn't take this on as a blind buy, but if you know of and area a fan of Haraway's work, her latest book is rich with near-end-of-career, all out academic goodness.

This is a rarity--a book that clear-sightedly addresses the troublesome issue of climate change and general environmental degradation, yet is not relentlessly depressing. Haraway plays with words and ideas, producing a mind-bending work that pushes the reader off center. ONLY by breaking out of our current paradigm, invisible in its ubiquity, can we move forward. A wordsmith, the author does spend a lot of time on terminology, and a bit egotistically champions her own phrases, but the journey she offers is well worth the pedantry. It matter what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what words express ideas.

This is an extraordinary and extremely valuable book well summarized by many other admiring readers.It opens pathways for our life on earth, in whatever circumstances, as requiring that we recognize and attend to the deep fabric of linkeage in our multi-species existences. That is, a far wider view of what constitutes social/ecological good and the practices that might follow. Thank you so very much.

I cannot believe I am the first here to review this book. No doubt I will disagree with some of it's contents, but already it's said so many vital things about the hope and disillusionment that must be the constant companion of any engaged person in these times. I am delighted with what is being said and the grace with which it is spoken. Thank you.

Book arrived exactly as described by the seller and within the expected delivery range.