Abstract: Did disenchantment lead to “climate change”? In The States of the Earth (2024), Mohamed Amer Meziane argues that secularization, which European colonialism engendered, paved the way for the environmental crisis. Exploring the history of 19th century imperialism, he shows how Western-European empire-states claimed to be “secular” while they entered the “age of coal”, thus employing Orientalism as a way of racializing subjects and converting them, not only to Christianity, but to a fossilized world called “civilization”. Hence: If the so-called secular age is a carbon era, then isn’t the Anthropocene a Secularocene?

Bio: Mohamed Amer Meziane is the Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities at Brown University. He holds a PhD in Philosophy and Intellectual History from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. After teaching at Columbia University as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, he joined Brown University in 2023. He is the author of The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization. The book won the Albertine Prize for non-fiction in 2023 and was published in English in April 2024 by Verso Books. His second book was published in French in 2023. It is titled: Au bord des mondes. Vers une anthropologie métaphysique (Alongside Worlds: Towards a Metaphysical Anthropology). His work reaches both an Academic and non-Academic audiences in Europe and Africa, with talks at Harvard University, The Collège de France, MoMa PS1, LuMA, The Night of Ideas in New York or Dakar as well as in Morocco. His books have been reviewed in several media such as Le Monde, Mediapart and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also invited to write texts about several contemporary artists for exhibitions catalogs, art galleries or journals such as Flash Art.