Anthropocene Writing: Ocracoke 2159 and Speculative Ethnography

This thesis explores modes of writing and research appropriate for the Anthropocene, when humans and their culture are rendered precarious by other-than-human processes. Fictocriticism and science fiction, and philosophical schools of thought, object-oriented ontology and phenomenology, are given special attention. I argue that anthropology is a constitutive and poetic space, rather than an objective science of culture, and that creative writing is indispensable for writing in and about the Anthropocene because it has the capacity to imagine novel futures and ways of being. Embedded in the text is a short story, which speculates about life on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, between the years 2059 and 2159.