The Trouble with Babies, Donna Haraway. 2016-Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene Durham: Duke University Press, ISBN 9780822362241

Abstract

<p>Although Donna Haraway’s new book, <i>Staying with the Trouble</i>, is marketed as a monograph, it is really a collection of essays that many of us will have encountered in other contexts. ‘Sowing Worlds: A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others’, for instance, first appeared in <i>Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway</i> (2013) and has been in my Ecocriticism course reader ever since.1 Likewise, I cite ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’ from <i>Environmental Humanities</i> in one of my recent journal articles.2 Neither article has been rewritten for this book. Other sections are familiar to me as keynote lectures I have heard in the flesh or listened to online. I begin my review in this somewhat narcissistic way to illustrate my bias—I am very engaged with Haraway’s work—and also to foreshadow my reservations about the success of this volume with specific regard to the central provocation announced in its title, namely the question of ‘making kin’.</p>