Salar Mameni’s  Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics proposes a provocative thesis: our current epoch is not just the Anthropocene, but what he calls the Terracene—a convergence of ecological crisis and racialized militarism shaped by the "war on terror." The Terracene reframes how we understand earth-time, empire, oil, and art. Here's a refined breakdown of its core ideas:

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🪨 1. From Anthropocene to Terracene

• Mameni argues that the widespread embrace of the Anthropocene narrative—where "Anthropos" is blamed for planetary ruin—coincides with post‑9/11 global militarization.

• In the Terracene, the figure of the "terrorist" mirrors that of "humanity" as scapegoats, crafting a geopolitical terrain where both geology and security are territorialized and securitized Project MUSE+11dukeupress.edu+11Duke University Press Read+11.

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2. Crude Aesthetics

• “Crude” is more than chemistry: it’s an aesthetic and colonial category used to other both matter (oil, earth) and people (often racialized, Indigenous, Muslim) .

• Extractivist discourse labels oil and regions—as well as their peoples—as “crude” to justify capitalist exploitation and imperial entitlement.

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3. Petrorefusal & Earth Intelligence

• Mameni highlights a concept he dubs “petrorefusal”—moments like the 1961 Golestan oil-field fire in Iran where oil resists extraction—an expression of geological agency and resistance Project MUSESocial Science Matrix.

• This shifts the narrative away from human mastery toward a recognition of earth’s intelligence and non-human temporality.

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4. Terran Deities & Material–Spiritual Entanglement

• In a series of chapters on deities—Lamassu, Huma, Homa, Pazuzu—Mameni explores how art from regions like Iran and Yemen reimagines multispecies, multi‑temporal deities tied to oil, fire, disease, and heat prospero.hu+10Social Science Matrix+10dukeupress.edu+10.

• These figures challenge Western secular/materialist ontologies, weaving environmental, spiritual, and political threads together.

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5. Narrative Terrorism

• Mameni critiques how the “war on terror” operates as narrative terrorism—a discursive form that constructs and governs entire landscapes through stories and fear dukeupress.edu+1prospero.hu+1.

• Power is exerted through narrative rather than merely physical violence, shaping both minds and maps.

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6. Art as Terracene Aesthetics

• Mameni emphasizes artworks that sense beyond the visual—incorporating sound, touch, smell, and temporal depth .

• Art becomes a mode of engaging with the earth's agency, the residue of violence, and the texture of petroleum landscapes—a multi-sensorial, ethically charged aesthetic attuned to Terracene conditions.

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✅ Key Takeaway

Terracene is less a new epoch to ID, and more a critical lens—showing how extraction, war, oil, and empire entwine on geological and aesthetic levels. It demands seeing earth not as inert background but as intelligent, resistant, spiritual—even divine. Mameni reimagines how we might sense—and respond to—the contested planet we inhabit.

* Introduces non-Western cosmopolitics as ways of rethinking materiality and time.

Can you explain this further

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Yes — let’s unpack what Terracene means by introducing non-Western cosmopolitics to rethink materiality and time, particularly through Islamic cosmologies and aesthetics.

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📜 1. What Are “Cosmopolitics”?

“Cosmopolitics” refers not to global citizenship but to the politics of cosmos-making — how different cultures, ontologies, and epistemologies construct what reality is, how it works, and who/what matters. Isabelle Stengers popularized the term to signal that different worlds have different orders of sense, and those differences are political.

In Terracene, Mameni draws on this to say:

The Western modern world isn't the only way to relate to the earth, to time, or to matter.

Western modernity (especially post-Enlightenment) tends to assume:

• Linear time

• Separation of subject/object

• Disenchanted matter

• A progressive, extractive relation to the world

But other cosmologies — like those in Islamic, Persian, and decolonial traditions — propose non-linear, relational, and non-extractive alternatives.

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🕰 2. Rethinking Time: Non-Linear Temporalities

Islamic cosmologies, as engaged in Terracene, often imagine time as:

• Cyclic, folded, or layered, not strictly linear

• Infused with divine presence, not secularized or evacuated of meaning

• Simultaneously eschatological and immanent, meaning oriented toward both worldly experience and spiritual end-times

This challenges:

• The colonial “clock time” that synchronizes populations to capitalist rhythms

• The Anthropocene's narrative of linear “progress → crisis → redemption”

• And the imperial war-time logic of urgent action and preemption

Instead, Mameni recovers a temporality of entanglement, where histories of violence and cosmological futures coexist — a mode of being that resists being compressed into productivity or crisis.

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🧱 3. Rethinking Matter and Earth

Western metaphysics tends to define matter as:

• Passive

• Dead

• Raw material to be shaped by human will

But in Islamic cosmologies and certain Persian aesthetic traditions (e.g., miniature painting), matter is:

• Animated by divine breath or metaphysical ordering

• Interwoven with ethical, spiritual, and relational significance

• Not a resource, but part of a living system with its own logics

This enables a different reading of earth:

• Not as something to be extracted from (crude oil, land)

• But as co-agent, sacred, and in relation with bodies, atmospheres, and unseen forces

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🧿 4. Islamic Aesthetics as Cosmopolitical Practice

Mameni is not nostalgic or essentialist — she doesn’t claim Islamic or Persian traditions are “pure” or untainted. Instead, she shows that:

• Islamic visual forms (like miniature painting) encode cosmopolitical knowledge — multi-scalar views, non-linear narratives, and non-human agency

• These forms refuse Western perspectivalism (single, all-seeing vantage) and challenge visual regimes of surveillance, such as drone imagery or satellite views

• They offer alternative ways to image and imagine the earth, not as an object to be surveyed, but as a surface of relation

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🧩 Summary

By turning to non-Western cosmopolitics, Terracene disrupts the dominant Western, secular, linear, and extractive frames that govern our relationship to:

• Time (as urgency, progress, efficiency)

• Earth (as dead resource)

• Aesthetics (as disinterested representation)

And instead proposes:

• Time as entangled and spiritual

• Earth as relational and sacred

• Aesthetics as cosmological practice, not neutral image-making