I am one of 4 speakers at the event The Environmental Humanities in Anglophone Literature and Media that takes place at Copenhagen University on 26 November, 2024. My talk will be on the topic “Tales of Violence and Extraction: Defining the American Climate Emergency Narrative”. This draws from the Future Food Imaginaries in Global Climate Fiction project, and also from my book The American Climate Emergency Narrative.
More specifically, my talk critically investigates the assumption that climate fiction is a new genre that provides roadways to more sustainable futures. Building on the world-ecology framework and using a world-literature perspective, it shows that much American cli-fi is in fact much more interested in the preservation of American capitalist modernity than in climate breakdown. As described in my book The American Climate Emergency Narrative (2024), this type of cli-fi can be traced back to the emergence of stories that promote violence and extraction as essential to the building of secure futures. The origins of American cli-fi are thus in early settler-colonial and plantation narratives, tales of adventurous yet catastrophic coal and oil mining, and science fiction stories about conflict over, or even with, the resources of the planet. Rooted in this material and literary history, much American cli-fi insists that the specific emergency it narrates can only be resolved by the very system that produced it in the first place. Thus, the vision of the future the American Climate Emergency Narrative produces is either one in which modernity is revitalized or where the entire world comes to a grotesque end.
The event will also include talks by my excellent colleague at LNU Rebecca Duncan, by Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder at the University of Iowa and by Gina Caison at Georgia State University. If you are in the neighbourhood, please check it out. All are welcome and no sign-up necessary.