The politics of animal time: species, race, and the Anthropocene

This paper explores how biological conceptions of species in time can obscure the creativity and invention of animals over time. Traditionally, species has been approached as a problem either for and of biology, or for and of politics. As a political problem, concepts of species are closely tied to concepts of race. This paper negotiates between these two approaches by stepping back from species and race, which are abstractions, and exploring instead the changing historical and contemporary configurations of variation and time that undergird and define them. My argument is that the present organisation of (evolutionary) time and (genetic non-) variation has contributed to the ‘liberation’ of race as a political concept, at the expense of the reification of species. I make this argument in the context of analyses of the Anthropocene, and in dialogue with Kathryn Yusoff's (2024) work on race, and Sylvia Wynter's (1995, 2015), and Yasmin Gunaratnam and Nigel Clark's (2012), efforts to politicise the human species. In the final part of the paper, I explore how natural selection frames species identities, and how it gives no reason to contest that framing. As such, it stands in the way of the claim that animals not only have histories, but that they are their histories. Finally, I address how the relative speed of anthropogenic climate crisis disrupts some of the foundations of these debates, and reinforces others (particularly human exceptionalism).