This is is something you see in Hispanic/latine discourse. The adherence that one's speaking of Spanish in a particular accent, dialect, or mode is more 'proper' or 'ideal' , alongside a host of other signifiers, serves to differentiate a people with a shared history of colonization. Someone from Mexico may not speak or look like someone from Puerto Rico or Haiti but that's not because there is some platonic form of each. The colonialist distinction of 'mestizos' and 'mulatto' is rooted into the ideas which these nations were founded on.

I think Chantal hit on an important point that often diasporic discourse ( for any peoples) can in attempting to reclaim some degree of identity ,stolen by colonization, can fit itself back into the same hegemonic orderings.

In ethnic studies and just in general discourse about 'diasporas', it is often the case that national and by necessity historically contingent differences between a peoples are treated as innate features to a particular group within the diaspora.

Something akin to what the German pessimist philosopher Philip Mainlander thought, that we'd all be redeemed in the evitable death of the universe.

The Anthropocene might be seen as 'our current epoch' but with framing it, it becomes a sort narrative marker. By declaring us in a 'so in so' age or the time of 'so and so', we are not making a descriptive claim about how the world simply as is, we are jam packing it with all the ideas and speculation a moment in time necessarily brings. The 19th century wasn't just defined by what cultural products and images it created, but what they thought the future would look like to them.

Hegel famously thought that eastern cultures like China were essentially 'stuck in time', and in capable of progress the same way Europeans had. Often time in western thought rationality is essential for there to be history at all, but in particular a very Eurocentric definition of reason.

Perhaps it could be seen also as a turn in which the subject/object dichotomy is challenged. The subject is not separate from the object, man is not separate from the Earth. By our expenditure of what we render as mere objects, they [the "objects" in question] reciprocally perhaps unveil themselves to be more animate and 'living' than we considered. This is not to say that like your table is gonna start talking ala Beauty and the Beast, but that our relationship to technology or animals or to the Earth itself is not one of untethered exploitation (in the literal sense). "The abyss will also gaze into thee" and all that jazz.

If we want to frame and approach what history is, has been and will be, it cannot come from a humanist and idealist framework, as those tend to promote progress and progress in a very centered way. 'Manifest Destiny' or 'Nazism' or 'Liberalism' push progress through use and exclusion. Otherness, is excluded from grand historically narratives and it sees otherness as an obstacle to a narrative's telos. 'Negative universal history' is not one where something is worked towards and by necessity something is left out, but one where history itself is going towards nothing (literally no-thing) and we must embrace everything.

This reminds of a book called 'All Tomorrows' , which is like this fun work on speculative evolution and science fiction that sees an alien researcher chronicling humanity after our extinction. According to the research done by these far flung aliens we managed about one billion years of existence out in space and evolved into a multitude of different species.

r.i.p :(

It is not a surprise that with the 'end of history' comes the end of ,well, everything. Where Hegel, and later Marx, agreed that history was a liner process and had a telos (purpose) towards an ultimate goal or end, we have reached it, but in some sense and I think what this article means to analyze is the incapability to conjure new epochs or futures and how this lack of cultural imagination is inextricably linked to our destruction. If there isn't anything new to create, nothing to look forward too , we'll just shrivel up and die.

This alludes to the famous slogan back in the 60's and 70's "Make Love, Not War". It alludes to it in order to critique. She sees this idea that passing of our problems to our children and this promotion to increase the human population, is problematic as it centers human beings as being the main drivers of ecological conditions, and this human centric framing only accelerates the destruction of the planet. That's not say Haraway is arguing for some anti-natalist position, but rather that survival on our planet does not depend on us. It depends on the way in which we can stand in solidarity with all species.

Kin, is used here to mean relation but as she stated previously not in a familial or genealogical sense. She wants to create a new frame, a new narrative, an ontology of not being but being as kin. To be kin is to be modular to the environment. When she says assemblages she wants us to get out of thinking of ourselves as just individualized subjects, only able to think in one head, ,but that actively we are connected to the world.

Here, Haraway wants to abandon the notion that some how the Earth must be saved in it's totally by humanity. This concept of the 'world' only serves to frame as it's sole begetters, inhabitants, and ultimate destroyers. For Haraway, we are to knee deep in the problem to bring it to a halt. We must collaborate multi-species wise.