Staying with the Trouble
Making Kin in the Chthulucene
“Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future,” declares Donna Haraway in the opening paragraph of this radical and astonishing book. Haraway eschews the notion of an Anthropocene, preferring instead what she calls the chthulucene—a time that is now, that is present, that is engaged with all the critters and creatures of the world, that stays with the trouble instead of trying to surpass it. Her vision is one of trust and interdependence and adaptation—of a willingness to exist in complexity, to refuse to elide our interconnectedness. So much thinking about climate change and the world we are living in either succumbs to despair or else presupposes some inevitable technological fix. Amidst all that, this book is a refuge.