Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene

Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene radically re-interprets Buster Keaton's iconic 1924 film, The Navigator, through the combined lenses of posthumanism and critical race theory. This book deconstructs the film's underlying anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity while exposing the unthinking whiteness of theorists and philosophers, including Gilles Deleuze, who have given Keaton's work pride of place in the history of cinema. Through its daring and provocative analysis of Keaton's classic, Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene invites us to consider cinema itself, at least in its classical narrative form, as a tool for constructing and maintaining white supremacy while building the conceptual tools for a world beyond whiteness.

William Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (Berghahn, 2013). He also is a maker of zero-budget films including En Attendant Godard (2009), Common Ground (2012), Selfie (2014), Circle/Line (2017), and This is Cinema (forthcoming). He is also currently co-writing a book on cephalopods and cinema with David H. Fleming called Kinoteuthis Infernalis: The Emergence of Chthulumedia. He lives in London, UK.