10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5777
application/pdf
2239-625X
5777
1
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urn:nbn:it:unica-29230
Natalia Buier
Anuac
Stefania Barca, Forces of reproduction. Notes for a counter-hegemonic anthropocene, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 88
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
12
Book reviews
2023-05-10
2023-05-10
2023-06-22
2023-06-22
131-134
1
Natalia Buier
2023/05/10
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5777
131
University of Barcelona, Spain
2239-625X
1
134
urn:nbn:it:unica-29230
Stefania Barca, Forces of reproduction. Notes for a counter-hegemonic anthropocene, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 88
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/5777/5649
12
                                          2023 | Anuac. Vol. 12, n° 1, Giugno 2023: 131-134




                                                                            Recensioni

Stefania Barca | Forces of reproduction. Notes for a counter-hegemonic
Anthropocene, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 88.




   Stefania Barca’s 2020 book, Forces of reproduction, is an advancing con-
tribution to the growing body of literature that critically examines the
Anthropocene concept through unearthing its constitutive silences. Like oth-
er critical alternatives to the Anthropocene narrative, such as those embodied
in the concepts of Capitalocene or Plantationocene, Forces of reproduction pro-
ceeds in two steps: first, it identifies the denials implicit in the Anthropocene
master narrative; second, it reinstates marginalised subjects into a non-hege-
monic account of human-extra-human relationships at a time of generalised
socio-environmental crisis. Barca’s succinct exposition captures her previous
work’s political and analytical core. In a mere 60 pages, she lays out the case
for synthesising eco-feminism and historical materialism. She sketches what
she terms the four levels of denial upon which the Anthropocene narrative is
built: colonial, gender, class, and species relations.
   Like other contributions to the Elements in Environmental Humanities
book series, Forces of reproduction is meant to offer a synthetic, authorita-
tive, and comprehensive coverage of a core problem. The stated goal of the
text is to displace the hegemonic Anthropocene master’s narrative and “al-
low counter-hegemonic visions of modernity to emerge” (p. 1). If, according
to the hegemonic narrative, the forces of production as carried forward by
industrial capitalism represent the key drivers of progress, Barca’s overview
is a brief and effective contribution to the case for reclaiming the agency of
marginalised subjects whose care of the biophysical environment ensures
the reproduction of human and extra-human life. This endeavour is situ-
ated within a broader project of narrative justice that recovers alternative



This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Natalia Buier
2023 | Anuac. Vol. 12, n° 1, Giugno 2023: 131-134.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5777
132                                          Stefania Barca | Forces of reproduction

understandings of modernity; as such, it is a path to historicising and pro-
vincialising dominant ways of understanding and enacting nature-society
relationships.
   One of the outstanding merits of the book is how it identifies core polit-
ical-analytical tensions. No doubt aware of the essentialising tendencies of
many academic attempts to recover non-Western ontologies, and with a crit-
ical gaze sharpened by the tools of historical materialism, the author alerts of
the dangers of reconstructing alternative modernities as traditional visions
and contained sociocultural worlds. Similarly, the case for the feminist lens
takes the form of a remarkably clear and synthetic argument for employing
materialist eco-feminism as a tool for revealing the patriarchal power struc-
tures hidden under the pretence of gender neutrality of the Anthropocene
narrative. The critical analysis of relations of reproduction is built around a
refusal to see connections between gender and non-human nature as fixed
or immanent. It adds to a significant and urgent case for a relational analy-
sis of “other-than-industrial ways of interacting with the biosphere” (p. 37).
This is complemented by an imperative corrective to numerous alternative
accounts of non-dominant socio-ecological relations, namely the insistence
that the recovery of actual and potential reproductive agencies is a way of re-
vealing “autonomous ways of being within modernity” (p. 25). At stake, then,
is not only the recovery of non- and anti-capitalist relationalities but also
the reclaiming of modernity, as process and project, as a terrain of struggle.
   The merits of Forces of reproduction, best read as an insightful and judi-
cious introduction to the expanding record of critiques of the Anthropocene
concept and an eloquent summary of the argument for bringing eco-fem-
inism and historical materialism to bear upon each other, also imply
inevitable limits. Thus, while the overview of actual and potential eco-fem-
inist contributions to the renewal of historical materialism is achieved with
an impressive economy of means, the case of and for historical materialism
appears less accomplished. Nonetheless, the case for historical materialism
is convincingly made through the overall dynamic structure within which
colonial, gender, class, and species relations are revealed as co-constitutive.
However, the case of historical materialism as a long-standing source of in-
ternal critique within a broadly understood Marxian tradition needs to be
more accounted for. Genealogies of historical materialism will necessarily
be a function of the political field into which analysis is inscribed. Yet, the
transversal contributions that historical materialism as critical epistemology



2023 | Anuac. Vol. 12, n° 1, Giugno 2023: 131-134
Stefania Barca | Forces of reproduction                                        133

has made to the critique of both scientific materialism and the proliferating
new, ontologically inflected materialisms indicate a deep current of Marxian
thought in the light of which the synthesis such as the one proposed in Forc-
es of reproduction appears less as a novel agenda and more like the inheritor
of a sustained if marginalised multivocal critical tradition.
   The uneven structure of the case for the integration of eco-feminism and
historical materialism, with much more attention devoted to the former,
has other implications that remain important, albeit unsolvable within the
constraints of the format. One of them is the privileging of the category of
modernity at the expense of that of capitalism. Thus, the reader feels that
capitalism, rather than being treated as a social formation, appears as a de-
rivative category of modernity, the latter the master frame within which
ideological processes and valuation conflicts unfold. While this does not
pose significant problems for identifying how global inequalities structure
and mediate human-extra-human relational configurations, it encounters
its limits in general statements about “turning commoners into proletari-
ans” (p. 42) or the readily accepted opposition between capitalism and state
socialism.
   Nonetheless, the section about the class denials of the Anthropocene
master narrative remains one of the most moving and inspiring in the book.
Here, questions about the contradictory positions labouring classes inhabit
as insider-outsiders within capitalist production processes (or what could
also be fruitfully characterised as the reproduction of capital) come to the
fore. The tense relationship between agency and resistance emerges as an
open-ended political question about the relationship between the refusal of
alienation, ecological relations and industrial working-class subjectivities.
As the author walks the reader through the poems of worker-poet Ferruccio
Brugnaro, the “obstinate refusal of objectification” (p. 59) is revealed not
only as an extension of alternative modes of habitation but also as a demand
for recognition from within the lives of those already dispossessed. Those
that critical historical materialism has obstinately refused to throw to the
dustbin of history are reinstated as subjects capable of recognising alien-
ation as an ongoing process rather than an inexorable identity they inhabit.
The transformative potential of resistance, in its ambiguous relationship
with agency, is thus reinstated in the recognition that workers’ bodies are
the front lines of capitalism’s sacrifice zones. Forces of reproduction thus
guides the reader to the heart of one of the most pressing contradictions of



                                   2023 | Anuac. Vol. 12, n° 1, Giugno 2023: 131-134
134                                          Stefania Barca | Forces of reproduction

our times: that change must come not only from a real or postulated out-
side to capitalist socio-ecologies but from within landscapes of pervasive
socio-ecological injustice and deep histories of subordinating the inescap-
able unity of human and non-human nature to the reproduction of capital.



                                                                     Natalia Buier
                                                           University of Barcelona
                                                                    buier@ub.edu




2023 | Anuac. Vol. 12, n° 1, Giugno 2023: 131-134
