Grey

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the various conceptions of the color grey. Grey is an expanse for what might be called disanthropocentrism: a sweep in which an environmental justice may flourish, with its attention to lived human existence, as well as the vibrant matter, dark ecologies, and object orientations that are so much a part of the new materialism. Grey reveals the inhuman as a thriving of life in other forms, a vitality even in decay that demonstrates how the nonhuman is already inside, cohabitating and continuing. Grey is also the tint the flesh acquires as cells deprived of nutrients become energy for other creatures, for whom our demise is a flourishing. At this mortal boundary grey is undead, which brings to mind zombies and their ubiquitous presence in popular culture. It suggests that being undead could mean something more than inhabiting a terminal world, a vastness reduced to the grey of an earthbound despair. Zombies without apocalypse might offer a future in which we recognize the suffering, the possibilities, the potency, and the dignity of humans and nonhumans alike: grey as the color of unexpected life.

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