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Journal articles on the topic 'Anthropocene fiction'
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1
Milner, Andrew, and James Burgann Milner. "Anthropocene Fiction and World-Systems Analysis." Journal of World-Systems Research 26, no. 2 (2020): 350–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2020.988.
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As developed by Immanuel Wallerstein and various co-thinkers, world-systems analysis is essentially an approach to economic history and historical sociology that has been largely indifferent to literary studies. This indifference is perhaps surprising given that the Annales school, which clearly influenced Wallerstein’s work, produced a foundational account of the emergence of modern western literature in Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s L’apparition du livre (1958). More recently, literary scholars have attempted to apply this kind of analysis directly to their own field. The best-known instances are probably Pascale Casanova’s La republique mondiale des lettres (1999), Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (2013) and the Warwick Research Collective’s Combined and Uneven Development (2015). More recently still, Andrew Milner in Australia and Jerry Määttä in Sweden have sought to apply “distant reading” more specifically to the genre of science fiction. Milner’s model of the “global SF field” identifies an original Anglo-French core, supplemented by more recent American and Japanese cores, longstanding Russian, German, Polish and Czech semi-peripheries, an emergent Chinese semi-periphery, and a periphery comprising the rest of the world. This essay attempts to apply that model to what Adam Trexler has termed “Anthropocene fictions” and Daniel Bloom “cli-fi”, which we treat here as a significant sub-genre of contemporary science fiction.
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Caracciolo, Marco, Andrei Ionescu, and Ruben Fransoo. "Metaphorical patterns in Anthropocene fiction." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 28, no. 3 (2019): 221–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947019865450.
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This article explores metaphorical language in the strand of contemporary fiction that Trexler discusses under the heading of ‘Anthropocene fiction’ – namely, novels that probe the convergence of human experience and geological or climatological processes in times of climate change. Why focus on metaphor? Because, as cognitive linguists working in the wake of Lakoff and Johnson have shown, metaphor plays a key role in closing the gap between everyday, embodied experience and more intangible or abstract realities – including, we suggest, the more-than-human temporal and spatial scales that come to the fore with the Anthropocene. In literary narrative, metaphorical language is typically organized in coherent clusters that amplify the effects of individual metaphors. Based on this assumption, we discuss the results of a systematic coding of metaphorical language in three Anthropocene novels by Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, and Ian McEwan. We show that the emergent metaphorical patterns enrich and complicate the novels’ staging of the Anthropocene, and that they can destabilize the strict separation between human experience and nonhuman realities.
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Imbach, Jessica. "Chinese Science Fiction in the Anthropocene." Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 12, no. 1 (2021): 121–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.37536/ecozona.2021.12.1.3527.
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A green future has become a central promise of the Chinese state and the environment is playing an increasingly important role in China’s bid to promote itself as a political alternative to the West. However, Chinese state environmentalism and its promotion of “ecological civilization” (shengtai wenming 生 态文明 ) have so far proven more aligned with political interests rather than environmental goals. At the same time, low -orbit industrialization as a response to the climate change or the resurgent fantasy of p opulation control as a necessity from the standpoint of biology in environmentalist discourse are increasingly entangled with anxieties and speculations about Chinese visions of the future. Using Liu Cixin’s short story The Sun of China ( Zhongguo taiyang 中国太阳 , 2001) and the 2019 blockbuster science fiction movie The Wandering Earth ( Liulang diqiu 流浪地球 ) by Frant Gwo as its point of departure, this paper discusses how current narratives of the Anthropocene are reflected and negotiated in Chinese science fiction. While both works demonstrate the symbolic and economic importance of science and technology to China’s growth and self-image, they also reveal that we cannot separate questions of the planetary from the historical contexts, in which they emerge.
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Goldman, Marlene. "Autobiography in the Anthropocene. A Geological Reading of Alice Munro." European Journal of Life Writing 9 (December 28, 2020): BE75—BE92. http://dx.doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.9.37326.
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In the autobiographical stories of Nobel Prize award-winning author Alice Munro, questions of ontology and mortality are inextricably connected to matters of space and place. Fundamental existential dilemmas expressed in Munro’s corpus – signaled by the title of her second short story collection Who Do You Think You Are? – are linked to basic questions concerning orientation. Although autobiographical fiction frequently interweaves concerns about identity and deceased parents with recollections of ancestral spaces, as the literary critic Northrop Frye famously stated, the question ‘Where is here?’ is characteristic of the Canadian imagination. It is now also fundamental to the epoch of the Anthropocene. Although critics frequently praise Munro for her skill in presenting haunting, epiphanic moments, she is less often credited for her far less conventional tendency to tell stories covering years, even decades. My paper explores Munro’s preoccupation with these vast temporal arcs and their impact on her recursive autobiographical fiction. I argue that Munro’s penchant for ‘return and revision’ in her non-fictional works affords an opportunity for her protagonists and, by extension, her readers to revisit and ponder ancestral connections and the non-human dimensions of existence, which include sublime geological features and deep time.
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Holterhoff, Kate. "Late Nineteenth-Century Adventure Fiction and the Anthropocene." Configurations 27, no. 3 (2019): 271–300. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/con.2019.0017.
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Hay, Jonathan. "(Post)human Temporalities: Science Fiction in the Anthropocene." KronoScope 19, no. 2 (2019): 130–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685241-12341440.
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AbstractAlthough many SF texts proceed from the speculative premise that our species will continue to develop technologically, and hence become increasingly posthuman, our species’ continuance into even the next century is by no means assured. Rather, the Anthropocene exerts a new temporal logic; it is an age defined by an intensification of geological timescales. It is therefore noteworthy that many contemporary SF texts are ecologically interventionist and figure apocalyptic future temporalities which curtail the posthuman predilection common to the genre. This article analyses a tetrad of literary texts, written at various points during the last three decades, which summatively reveal the mutations of the (post)human temporalities figured by cli-fi texts. These four texts are: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (1992-1996); Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007); Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things (2014); and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015).
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Caracciolo, Marco. "Strange birds and uncertain futures in Anthropocene fiction." Green Letters 24, no. 2 (2020): 125–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2020.1771608.
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Xausa, Chiara. "Climate Fiction and the Crisis of Imagination." Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 8, no. 2 (2021): 99–119. http://dx.doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v8i2.555.
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This article analyses the representation of environmental crisis and climate crisis in Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) by Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright. Building upon the groundbreaking work of environmental humanities scholars such as Heise (2008), Clark (2015), Trexler (2015) and Ghosh (2016), who have emphasised the main challenges faced by authors of climate fiction, it considers the novels as an entry point to address the climate-related crisis of culture – while acknowledging the problematic aspects of reading Indigenous texts as antidotes to the 'great derangement’ – and the danger of a singular Anthropocene narrative that silences the ‘unevenly universal’ (Nixon, 2011) responsibilities and vulnerabilities to environmental harm. Exploring themes such as environmental racism, ecological imperialism, and the slow violence of climate change, it suggests that Alexis Wright’s novels are of utmost importance for global conversations about the Anthropocene and its literary representations, as they bring the unevenness of environmental and climate crisis to visibility.
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Hollister, Lucas. "The Green and the Black: Ecological Awareness and the Darkness of Noir." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 134, no. 5 (2019): 1012–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2019.134.5.1012.
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Ecocritical thought presents serious challenges for political readings of crime fiction and noir, notably in French and American cultural contexts, and these challenges merit a broad examination. How does the Anthropocene change our relation to the frames of intelligibility and the definitions of violence found in crime fictions? The scalar problems introduced by the cosmological perspectives of ecological awareness suggest the need to redraw the frontiers of noir, to imagine new green-black readings that transform our understanding of what counts in and as a noir novel.
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Hughes, William. "‘The evil of our collective soul’: Zombies, medical capitalism and environmental apocalypse." Horror Studies 12, no. 1 (2021): 7–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/host_00026_1.
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Though frequently comprehended as a vehicle for social satire or post-cultural speculation, zombie fictions also demonstrably mobilize the climatic unease of the current Anthropocene. Focusing in particular upon Max Brooks’s 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, this article considers the complex politics which have frequently underwritten a mythical origin for pandemics in the Othered East, and their contemporary reproduction in western concerns regarding unregulated surgery and the capitalism of human tissue. The article then proposes that the deterioration of human culture consequent upon the fictional zombie pandemic interrogates the contemporary understanding of integrated nationhood and problematizes the dichotomy structured between geographically stable and refugee populations. The sudden eclipse of the competitive Anthropocene by a mindless Zombicene brings not renewal for a planet no longer supporting agriculture and industry but rather a hastening of perceived environmental collapse, where unregulated hunting and the uncontrolled burning of natural resources accelerate climatic deterioration, imperilling further the survival of residual humanity. As a type of apocalyptic fiction, the zombie narrative thus poses questions with regard to the persistence of conventional human behaviours, even in a post-capitalist environment, where the political concepts structuring nationhood have come to function as little more than a memory.
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Heise, Ursula K. "Science Fiction and the Time Scales of the Anthropocene." ELH 86, no. 2 (2019): 275–304. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/elh.2019.0015.
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Kramshøj Flinker, Jens. "Climate Fiction and the Ethics of Existentialism." Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 12, no. 1 (2021): 167–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.37536/ecozona.2021.12.1.3826.
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The purpose of this article is twofold: Existentialism as a philosophical discipline and ethical reference point seems to be a rare guest in ecocriticism. Based on an analysis of Lyra Koli's climate fiction Allting Växer (2018) this article argues that existentialism has something to offer to the ecocritical field. I make use of an econarratological approach, drawing on James Phelan's narrative ethics. Thus, I emphasize the article's second purpose, as narrative ethics is about reconstructing narratives own ethical standards rather than the reader bringing a prefabricated ethical system to the narrative. This reading practice can help to question the idea that some ethical and philosophical standards are better than others within ecocriticism—by encouraging scholars in ecocriticism to relate to what existentialism has to do with climate change in this specific case. In continuation of my analysis, I argue that Allting Växer is pointing at a positive side of existentialist concepts such as anxiety or anguish, that is, that there is a reflecting and changing potential in these moods or experiences. This existentialist framework contrasts with the interpretation of "Anthropocene disorder" (Timothy Clark) as the only outcome when confronting the complexity of the Anthropocene.
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Ryan, John Charles. "6Ecocriticism." Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 27, no. 1 (2019): 100–122. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbz006.
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AbstractThis review of publications in the field of ecocriticism in 2018 is divided into six sections: 1. Introduction: Anthropocene Timescales and Affects; 2. Affective Ecocriticism; 3. Material and Empirical Ecocriticisms; 4. Ecocriticism and Ecopoetics; 5. Ecocritical Convergences; 6. Conclusion. The review focuses on four single-authored monographs, three edited book collections, three journal issues, and three stand-alone articles. The biospheric urgencies of the Anthropocene and its cataclysmic signature—climate change—have attracted ecocritical attention to concerns of time, scale, and affect. In particular, 2018 marked the further maturation of material and queer ecocriticisms, the florescence of affective ecocriticism, and the germination of empirical ecocriticism. The field in 2018 explores, in depth, the role of affect—emotions, intensities, corporealities, and modes of relations—in the Anthropocene. All the while, confluences between affective, material, and queer ecocriticisms continue to broaden the scope of environmental affect to include ‘bad’ and irreverent modes. What’s more, new publications in material ecocriticism draw attention to environmental narratives as vehicles for concretizing the highly abstract spatiotemporalities of the Anthropocene whereas empirical ecocriticism applies qualitative methods to understanding the transformative potential of narratives. 2018 saw major studies of ecopoetics in addition to convergences between ecocriticism, animal studies, performance studies, crime fiction studies, and the environmental humanities. The year also brought the extension of ecocritical approaches to the genre of crime fiction and the literature of the Global South.
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Williams, Daniel. "VICTORIAN ECOCRITICISM FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE." Victorian Literature and Culture 45, no. 3 (2017): 667–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150317000080.
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How might literary and cultural spheres intersect with the Anthropocene, the epoch — however defined — of humanity's detectable influence at geological scale? What forms, genres, objects, and methodological lenses might prove most fertile in mediating between the concept's abstraction and its concrete entailments for literary and cultural history? Such questions have already commissioned a range of critical projects that attempt to reframe the Anthropocene itself: as a trope of science fiction, given how humans are “terraforming” the planet (Heise 215–20); as an object for media archaeology, considering the “signatures” that our aggregate actions are leaving in the physical strata of the earth (Boes and Marshall 64–67); and as a challenge to the categorical distinctions by which historical study is practiced, with its blurring of “human history” and “natural history” (Chakrabarty 201–07).
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Mayer, Sylvia. "Environmental Risk Fiction and Ecocriticism." Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 11, no. 2 (2020): 147–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.37536/ecozona.2020.11.2.3534.
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Ecocriticism has been at the forefront of introducing risk theory and risk research to literary and cultural studies. The essay surveys this more recent trend in ecocritical scholarship, which began with the new millennium and has focused on the participation of fictional texts in various environmental risk discourses. The study of risk fiction draws our attention to cultural moments of uncertainty, threat, and instability, to risk scenarios both local and planetary—not least the risk scenarios of the Anthropocene in which species consciousness and ‘planetariness’ have become central issues. The essay reviews how key publications have shed light on the cultural and literary historical relevance of environmental risk and on various issues that are central to ecocriticism. It points out how they have sharpened our sense of both the spatial and temporal dimensions of environmental risk and environmental crisis, introduced new categories of ecocritical analysis, contributed to clarifying some of the field’s major conceptual premises, and added a new approach to genre discussions, in particular relating to fiction engaging with global anthropogenic climate change.
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Gajewska, Grażyna. "Ecology and Science Fiction. Managing Imagination in the Age of the Anthropocene." Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, no. 1 (47) (2021): 79–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/20843860pk.21.005.13459.
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When formulating proecological strategies, social imagination is devoted relatively little attention. Contribution of the humanities to the management in the age of the Anthropocene is most often perceived as explaining threats that we and the future human and non-human beings will have to face as a result of irresponsible environmental policies. Hence, the presumed task of the humanities (and social science) consists primarily in analyzing and presenting the causes and the processes which culminated in the climate crisis and the decline of biodiversity. However, such an approach does not allow this knowledge to be actively engaged in constructing alternative, proecological attitudes. Consequently, I argue in this paper that in order for the state of affairs to change one requires not only new scientific tools (methodology, language), but also new sensitivity and aesthetics. The author argues that the challenges of the current times, resulting from environmental change, destruction of habitats and ecological disasters, direct our sensibilities and aesthetics ever more tangibly towards the fantastic: horror, science fiction, or fantasy. However, while ecohorror mainly exposes the negative aftermath of the Anthropocene – culminating in the inevitable disaster – science fiction offers leeway for a more speculative approach, enabling one to construct such visions of reality in which multispecies justice will be observed and cultivated. It is therefore suggested that there is much need for a science fiction aesthetic and narration that would be capable of guiding us out of the anthropocentric entanglement and the Anthropocene into the Chthulucene (as conceived by Haraway).
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Rebecca Evans. "Nomenclature, Narrative, and Novum: “The Anthropocene” and/as Science Fiction." Science Fiction Studies 45, no. 3 (2018): 484. http://dx.doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.45.3.0484.
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Joo, Hee-Jung S. "We are the world (but only at the end of the world): Race, disaster, and the Anthropocene." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38, no. 1 (2018): 72–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263775818774046.
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This essay explores the racial politics of a select group of contemporary disaster film and fiction to reveal the relationship between race and futurity that also undergirds discussions of the Anthropocene. I provide a comparative close reading of the disasters in Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, Behn Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. I argue that the cultural anxieties that structure these texts are expressions of the racial logic rooted in universalist concerns for the future of humanity, the very concern of the Anthropocene. Arguing against inclusion as the means of achieving equality and toward a new materialist understanding of race, my paper illuminates not only the racial assumptions of the Anthropocene but also, and perhaps more importantly, its racial consequences.
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Rowan, Jamin Creed. "The Hard-Boiled Anthropocene and the Infrastructure of Extractivism." American Literature 93, no. 3 (2021): 391–416. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361237.
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Abstract This essay suggests that hard-boiled crime fiction in the United States has developed the kind of “deep infrastructural ethic” that John Durham Peters says is present in much modern thought. The essay attempts to illuminate the genre’s infrastructural ethic and its corresponding affordance for environmental critique by tracing its expressions through a sample of significant texts in the hard-boiled and noir canons, and by concluding with a sustained reading of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015). These readings demonstrate that hard-boiled narratives enable readers to perceive the ways in which extractivist infrastructures are frequently built upon and facilitate the exploitation of both human and environmental resources. Hard-boiled texts help readers see capitalism’s extractivist infrastructure as a type of material and intellectual entrapment that ultimately undermines the common good and the planetary commons. Further, this essay argues that hard-boiled crime fiction attends to what AbdouMaliq Simone calls “infrastructures of relationality” and thus points a way out of the material and metaphysical entrapments of an extractivist economy’s infrastructure. The infrastructures of relationality that emerge in a world in which climate crises have broken down the infrastructures of capitalism provide a platform from which individuals can practice a mode of collective thinking and being that offers an alternative to the alienation upon which extractivism depends. In short, the hard-boiled genre is not only one of the Anthropocene’s earliest cultural responders but is also a vital genre for making sense of our contemporary situation in a deeper stage of the Anthropocene.
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Łaszkiewicz, Weronika. "Decolonizing the Anthropocene: Reading Charles de Lint’s "Widdershins"." Acta Neophilologica 2, no. XXII (2020): 161–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.31648/an.5593.
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The aim of this paper is to examine Charles de Lint’s novel Widdershins(2006), whose main theme is an interspecies war for the American land. The paper demonstrates how, by exploring the themes of Indigenous suffering, belief in species interconnectedness, reverence for the natural world, and approach to trauma, the novel participates in the deconstruction of colonial structures present in the concept of the Anthropocene. The paper also engages de Lint’s novel in a dialogue with the studies on the Anthropocene to prove that, by providing its readers with alternative modes of thinking, fantasy fiction can contribute to the cognitive change required to save our planet from human-wrought destruction.
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Villanueva-Romero, Diana. "Literary Primatology: Reading Primatology in Ape Fiction." Atlantis. Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies 43, no. 1 (2021): 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.1.01.
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This article aims at defining the field of literary primatology and illustrating the main forms it has taken in Anglophone literatures in the twenty-first century. The article is organized around five sections. The first one introduces the term literary primatology. The second portrays the cultural background against which this field emerged. The third describes its main themes and illustrates them by bringing to the fore significant literary works produced in the twenty-first century. The fourth looks at examples of ape imaginings. Finally, I enumerate some of the unifying characteristics of these narratives and explain literary primatology as one of the responses to today’s Anthropocene anxiety and the feeling of grief or solastalgia for a dying planet.
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Leyda, Julia, and Sara Brinch. "Anthropocene slow TV: Temporalities of extinction in Svalbard." Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 10, no. 3 (2020): 297–309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jsca_00033_1.
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In Norway, slow television, an internationally popular format that approaches Nordic noir in export value, has been primarily concerned with entertaining viewers by showing Norwegians (and interested outsiders) their own country. The January 2020 NRK release of its slow TV programme Svalbard minutt for minutt (Svalbard Minute by Minute) focuses on this Arctic region, juxtaposing striking images of its native fauna with the remarkably well-preserved ecological crime scenes of its Anthropocene pasts. Svalbard Minute by Minute constitutes a daring mash-up of nation-branding nature programme and extractivist history documentary, via both non-fiction modes of place and process views, in which the two strains reinforce one another to pose difficult questions about the future for viewing audiences.
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Muñoz-González, Esther. "The Anthropocene, Cli-Fi and Food: Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam." Atlantis. Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies 43, no. 1 (2021): 39–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.1.03.
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This article examines Margaret Atwood’s climate fiction novel MaddAddam (2013), a dystopian cautionary text in which food production and eating become ethical choices related to individual agency and linked to sustainability. In the novel, both mainstream environmentalism and deep ecologism are shown to be insufficient and fundamentally irrelevant in the face of a submissive population, in a state of passivity that environmental studies scholar Stacy Alaimo relates to a scientific and masculinist interpretation of the Anthropocene. The article focuses on edibility as a key element in negotiating identity, belonging, cohabitation and the frontiers of the new MaddAddam postapocalyptic community.
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Li, Hua. "The environment, humankind, and slow violence in Chinese science fiction." Communication and the Public 3, no. 4 (2018): 270–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2057047318812971.
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This essay takes an analytical approach to examine some Chinese science fiction narratives with the themes of climate change, terraforming, and environment degradation—written from the mid-20th century to the early years of the 21st century. My broad reading of the texts treats these narratives as archive—textual sources that document a historical development of the impact of human activities on nature. On one hand, these narratives are all closely related to the country’s modernization, its economic takeoff, and the rhetoric of building a powerful China. On the other hand, they form one set of what can be understood as an emerging body of Chinese fiction located firmly within the strata and sediment of the Anthropocene. This body of literature offers a venue for explaining and exploring how economics, technological developments, and government policies have transformed the ecology, environment, and climate in the Anthropocene. These narratives also echo the concept of slow violence dubbed by Rob Nixon in 2011. These terraforming and climate narratives reveal an attritional violence of environmental degradation, climate change, and the consequential social and political problems that permeate so many of our lives. My close reading of Chen Qiufan’s novel The Waste Tide ( Huangchao, 2013) specifically portrays a slow and attritional violence—namely, the ways in which the electronics recycling industry have caused severe environmental and occupational impacts on nature and humans—through exploration of the complex relationships among technology, the economy, and the environment.
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Lorimer, Jamie. "The Anthropo-scene: A guide for the perplexed." Social Studies of Science 47, no. 1 (2016): 117–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0306312716671039.
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The scientific proposal that the Earth has entered a new epoch as a result of human activities – the Anthropocene – has catalysed a flurry of intellectual activity. I introduce and review the rich, inchoate and multi-disciplinary diversity of this Anthropo-scene. I identify five ways in which the concept of the Anthropocene has been mobilized: scientific question, intellectual zeitgeist, ideological provocation, new ontologies and science fiction. This typology offers an analytical framework for parsing this diversity, for understanding the interactions between different ways of thinking in the Anthropo-scene, and thus for comprehending elements of its particular and peculiar sociabilities. Here I deploy this framework to situate Earth Systems Science within the Anthropo-scene, exploring both the status afforded science in discussions of this new epoch, and the various ways in which the other means of engaging with the concept come to shape the conduct, content and politics of this scientific enquiry. In conclusion the paper reflects on the potential of the Anthropocene for new modes of academic praxis.
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Tüzün, Hatice Övgü. "Welcome to the Desert of the Anthropocene: Dystopian Cityscapes in (Post)Apocalyptic Science Fiction." American, British and Canadian Studies 30, no. 1 (2018): 171–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2018-0010.
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Abstract Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) manifest an environmentalist awareness of the increasingly destructive power of human technologies while challenging the prevalent models we employ to think about the planet as well as its human and non-human inhabitants. Both novels probe what it means to be human in a universe plagued by entropy in the era of the Anthropocene. For the purposes of this essay, I will concentrate particularly on Dick’s and Winterson’s portrayals of the dystopian city as a site of interconnections and transformations against a backdrop of encroaching entropy and impending doom. Drawing on the work of several (critical) posthumanists who are primarily interested in dissolving oppositions such as between nature/culture, biology/technology, I show how the displacement of the centrality of human agency due to the intrusive nature of advanced technology is happening in the broader context of the Anthropocene. I also argue that the dystopian cityscapes envisioned in both novels become places that allow for the possibility of new forms of subjectivity to emerge.
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Mondry, Henrietta. "The Anthropocene and Dogs’ Choices in Soviet and Post-Soviet Futurity Fiction." Russian Literature 114-115 (June 2020): 67–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ruslit.2020.07.004.
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Gough, Noel, and Chessa Adsit-Morris. "Troubling the Anthropocene: Donna Haraway, Science Fiction, and Arts of Un/Naming." Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 20, no. 3 (2019): 213–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1532708619883311.
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This article takes Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene as a point of departure for troubling the largely uncontested acceptance of the Anthropocene as a matter of scientific “fact.” Our approach is informed by our methodological commitments to understanding writing as a mode of inquiry and our preference for diffraction (rather than reflection) in conceptualizing practices of reading and critique. The article is therefore organized around questions that Haraway’s text provokes, and our responses to them. We draw on various sources, including selected science fiction (SF) texts, to trouble practices of naming geological epochs and also to trouble some of the assumptions that Haraway makes in offering “Chthulucene” as an alternative name for our present epoch.
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Marshall, Kate. "What Are the Novels of the Anthropocene? American Fiction in Geological Time." American Literary History 27, no. 3 (2015): 523–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajv032.
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Clark, Nigel. "Anthropocene Bodies, Geological Time and the Crisis of Natality." Body & Society 23, no. 3 (2017): 156–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1357034x17716520.
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In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a ‘crisis of natality’. Engaging with two works of fiction – Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces – the article explores the embodied, affective and intimate dimensions of the struggle to sustain life under catastrophic conditions. Though centred on male protagonists, both novels offer insights into a ‘stratigraphic time’ associated primarily with maternal responsibility – involving a temporal give-and-take that passes between generations and across thresholds in the Earth itself. If this is a construction of inter-corporeality in which each life and every breath has utmost value, it is also a vision that exceeds the biopolitical prioritization of the organismic body – as evidenced in both McCarthy’s and Michaels’ gesturing beyond the bounds of the living to a forceful, sensate and enigmatic cosmos.
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Yadav, Chesta. "Extraction Ecology: Environment and People in the Anthropocene." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 9, no. 4 (2021): 169–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v9i4.10998.
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The uncontrollable pursuit of growth and benefits has dominated our society. In developed part of the planet people live in energy phase of modernity but it is marked by instability of social situations and culture forms. It is often closely related to issues such as climate change, the disappearance of agro-biodiversity, or the loss of animal biodiversity. The extreme climate flux that human beings face today can be linked to the human continuous need for energy. The constant appetite to consume more and more energy has resulted in environmental degradation, like collapsed impoundment dams, floods, dead zones in forests. It has not only affected the environment but also people. It has given rise to unemployment, crippling poverty, and diseases such as black lung disease. This paper operates at the intersection of ecocriticism and extractive fiction studies to study the impact of mining by examining The Upheaval by Pundalik Naik. By applying the theory of ecocriticism, this paper will study and highlight how these places are rich in resources but are places of environmental degradation, public health issues, poverty and social conflict.
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Alberro, Heather. "Ecoutopia from Fiction to Fact: An Interview with Heather Alberro." Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature 1, no. 2 (2020): 44–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.46809/jcsll.v1i2.10.
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Human is at the heart of the story of climate change in the Anthropocene where, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty (2012), human behaviors have influenced the environment and created a distinct geological epoch. Current climate change issues are largely human induced. This implies that the human species is now part of the natural history of the planet. In November 2016, Stephen Hawking warned that humanity has 1000 years to leave the earth due to climate change, but in his most recent BBC documentary aired on June 15, 2017 called Expedition New Earth, he suggested humans have just 100 years left before doomsday. In spite of such warnings and writings, Donald Trump withdrew America from the Paris Climate Agreement on June 2017, on the same day, satellite images showed that a huge mass of ice in an area of five thousand square kilometres was breaking away from the Antarctic continent under the impact of rising temperature. It seems that Trump’s act is beyond ecological consideration as he believes the agreement could “cost America as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025”. Projections of climate change, however, have shown horrible scenarios involving a central economic metropolis such as New York losing much of its lands because of rising sea levels. The inhabitants of such areas will have to uproot their communities and cultures to move to less vulnerable lands. Thus, it is important to examine how ecoutopian literature is responding to the conditions of the human being in this epoch. In the following interview, Heather Alberro has answered to some questions on climate change, the conditions of human being in the Anthropocene, and the role of literature and culture in relation to environmental issues.
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Wächter, Cornelia. "String Figures of Response-ability and the Refusal to Respond in Clare Pollard’s The Weather." Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 9, no. 1 (2021): 60–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2021-0004.
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Abstract This article discusses Clare Pollard’s The Weather (Royal Court, 2004) with a focus on how the play critiques the widespread failure to assume responsibility for both personal and collective wrongdoing as symptomatic of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. More specifically, the paper reads Pollard’s play through the prism of Donna Haraway’s conception of science fiction as a figure, denoting “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far” (2) in order to demonstrate that it does contain a utopian kernel in its uncovering of the (affective) strings that bind individuals to the logic of the society of consumers (Bauman) and in its final appeal to cut those strings, even though the play does not actually transcend the capitalist imaginary.
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Tait, Adrian. "Environmental Crisis, Cli-fi, and the Fate of Humankind in Richard Jefferies’ After London and Robert Harris’ The Second Sleep." Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 8, no. 2 (2021): 69–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v8i2.554.
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This article discusses two instances of ‘Anthropocene fiction’ (Trexler, 2015: 4) that engage with the environmental crisis that industrial modernity has generated: Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885), and Robert Harris’ The Second Sleep (2019), which both depict a future in which technological civilisation has collapsed, and the non-human world is resurgent. Like climate change fiction, or cli-fi, these novels are concerned with the elusive and unpredictable environmental risks that modern societies inadvertently create, and with finding ways to negotiate the representational challenge of those risks; unlike many instances of climate change fiction, however, these novels do not set out to warn their readers of what is to come, or lament the disaster they depict. They are instead concerned with the legacy of technological civilisation – a legacy of risk and uncertainty – and the question of whether that legacy can ever be escaped. Neither novel offers an answer; but nor do they foreclose its possibility.
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Clark, Timothy. "What on World is the Earth?: The Anthropocene and Fictions of the World." Oxford Literary Review 35, no. 1 (2013): 5–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/olr.2013.0054.
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This paper develops a concept of the terrestrial as an abyssal boundary to the thinkable, looking to David Wood's deconstructive eco-phenomenology. The main section deploys this concept of the terrestrial to read various accounts and images of the sight of the whole earth from space. This then suggests a reading of Derrida's arguments on the ‘fiction of the world’. This material is framed at both ends of the paper by consideration of the “Anthropocene” as an ‘event’ which seems to exceed or query elements of Derrida's definition of the ‘event’.
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Fleming, David H., and William Brown. "Through a (First) Contact Lens Darkly: Arrival, Unreal Time and Chthulucinema." Film-Philosophy 22, no. 3 (2018): 340–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/film.2018.0084.
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Science fiction is often held up as a particularly philosophical genre. For, beyond actualising mind-experiment-like fantasies, science fiction films also commonly toy with speculative ideas, or else engineer encounters with the strange and unknown. Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016) is a contemporary science fiction film that does exactly this, by introducing Lovecraft-esque tentacular aliens whose arrival on Earth heralds in a novel, but ultimately paralysing, inhuman perspective on the nature of time and reality. This article shows how this cerebral film invites viewers to confront a counterintuitive model of time that at once recalls and reposes what Gilles Deleuze called a “third synthesis” of time, and that which J. M. E. McTaggart named the a-temporal “C series” of “unreal” time. We finally suggest that Arrival's a-temporal conception of the future as having already happened can function as a key to understanding the fate of humanity as a whole as we pass from the anthropocene, in which humans have dominated the planet, to the “chthulucene,” in which humans no longer exist on the planet at all.
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Laghi, Roberto. "Fiction, Science, Journalism: Hybrid Narrative Paths for Our Challenging Present." Cadernos de Literatura Comparada, no. 44 (2021): 239–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.21747/2183-2242/cad44a14.
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In this article I will explore the hypothesis that hybrid narrative forms (consisting of journalism, fiction and scientific knowledge) can be more effective in the task of narrating the present of the so-called Anthropocene, marked by the climate crisis and the consequences of neoliberal politics. As a first and fundamental step, I underline the need for a critical work on the language that dominates our societies, through the analysis of Personne ne sort les fusils by Sandra Lucbert. I then briefly consider the role that scientific information and its popularization can play in the hybridization of narrative forms, taking as an example the short story by Ted Chiang “The Evolution of Human Science”. I conclude by analysing Storie della grande estinzione by the Italian collective author TINA, which, with its coexisting different forms of fiction, essay, popular science and critical theory, is not only a clear example of this hybridization but also provides an important mythopoetic dimension based on these same forms.
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Whyte, Kyle P. "Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises." Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 1-2 (2018): 224–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2514848618777621.
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Portrayals of the Anthropocene period are often dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives of climate crises that will leave humans in horrific science-fiction scenarios. Such narratives can erase certain populations, such as Indigenous peoples, who approach climate change having already been through transformations of their societies induced by colonial violence. This essay discusses how some Indigenous perspectives on climate change can situate the present time as already dystopian. Instead of dread of an impending crisis, Indigenous approaches to climate change are motivated through dialogic narratives with descendants and ancestors. In some cases, these narratives are like science fiction in which Indigenous peoples work to empower their own protagonists to address contemporary challenges. Yet within literature on climate change and the Anthropocene, Indigenous peoples often get placed in historical categories designed by nonIndigenous persons, such as the Holocene. In some cases, these categories serve as the backdrop for allies' narratives that privilege themselves as the protagonists who will save Indigenous peoples from colonial violence and the climate crisis. I speculate that this tendency among allies could possibly be related to their sometimes denying that they are living in times their ancestors would have likely fantasized about. I will show how this denial threatens allies' capacities to build coalitions with Indigenous peoples. Inuit culture is based on the ice, the snow and the cold…. It is the speed and intensity in which change has occurred and continues to occur that is a big factor why we are having trouble with adapting to certain situations. Climate change is yet another rapid assault on our way of life. It cannot be separated from the first waves of changes and assaults at the very core of the human spirit that have come our way. Just as we are recognizing and understanding the first waves of change … our environment and climate now gets threatened. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, interviewed by the Ottawa Citizen. (Robb, 2015) In North America many Indigenous traditions tell us that reality is more than just facts and figures collected so that humankind might widely use resources. Rather, to know “it”—reality—requires respect for the relationships and relatives that constitute the complex web of life. I call this Indigenous realism, and it entails that we, members of humankind, accept our inalienable responsibilities as members of the planet's complex life system, as well as our inalienable rights. ( Wildcat, 2009 , xi) Within Māori ontological and cosmological paradigms it is impossible to conceive of the present and the future as separate and distinct from the past, for the past is constitutive of the present and, as such, is inherently reconstituted within the future. (Stewart-Harawira, 2005, 42) In fact, incorporating time travel, alternate realities, parallel universes and multiverses, and alternative histories is a hallmark of Native storytelling tradition, while viewing time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream is central to Native epistemologies. ( Dillon, 2016a , 345)
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Vermeulen, Pieter. "“The Sea, Not the Ocean”: Anthropocene Fiction and the Memory of (Non)human Life." Genre 50, no. 2 (2017): 181–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00166928-3890028.
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Sullivan, Heather Isabella. "Vegetal Scale in the Anthropocene: The Dark Green." Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 11, no. 2 (2020): 92–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.37536/ecozona.2020.11.2.3480.
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When exploring the problem of delineating possible “scales” useful to describe the Anthropocene’s ecological changes, I suggest plant-human relations as the basis of our models rather than solely Human impact with a capital “H” as if a stand-alone species. Instead, human beings are a species within the photosynthesis-shaped, oxygen-infused atmosphere, and countering the ongoing industrial ecocide means seeking multispecies justice. One may claim that the “vegetal” stands as the ontological antithesis of being “animal,” but that view expresses a one-dimensional disregard for the essential work and bodies of plants and their fellow photosynthesizers that produce oxygen, drive the carbon cycle, feed terrestrial life, and influence water cycles. Indeed, “animal” is an emergence from the vegetal context. But our plant stories are shifting with the anthropocenic inflection. This dark green project explores narratives, both scientific and creative, of plant-human interactions in time of planetary change; and these interactions are not always peaceful or on an easily comprehended scale. As an example, I consider the 2015 short science-fiction story from Alan Dean Foster, “That Creeping Sensation,” that portrays how plant-human relations take on frightening new forms in a climate-changed world altered by heat, carbon dioxide, and the not-always-supportive activities of plants. With all the heat and carbon dioxide, plant life explodes and produces a massive increase in oxygen. In response, insects grow enormous and specialized first-responders must battle the bugs. Foster’s texts portray scales of non-human agency larger than the human whose power encompasses, enables, and sometimes threatens human life. His “cli fi” tale of giant bugs presents human beings as inextricably enmeshed in a plant-dominated existence. To paraphrase Derrida, there is no outside the vegetal.
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von Mossner, Alexa Weik. "Science Fiction and the Risks of the Anthropocene: Anticipated Transformations in Dale Pendell'sThe Great Bay." Environmental Humanities 5, no. 1 (2014): 203–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615478.
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Helsing, Daniel. "Blues for a Blue Planet: Narratives of Climate Change and the Anthropocene in Non-Fiction Books." Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 1, no. 2 (2017): 38–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.26613/esic/1.2.47.
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Nicol, Bran. "Humanities Fiction: Translation and ‘Transplanetarity’ in Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival." American, British and Canadian Studies 32, no. 1 (2019): 107–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2019-0008.
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Abstract One of the more interesting science fiction movies of recent years, at least to Humanities academics, is Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 alien-invasion movie, Arrival. It is a film which not only features a Professor of Linguistics as its heroine, but the plot of which is organised around the critical global importance of a multi-million dollar translation project. This essay compares the film with the original novella upon which it was based – Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1998) – to examine the role translation plays in both, with the aim of placing this in the context of the crisis in the Humanities which has marked universities over the last few years, and can be linked to a more general crisis in liberal values. While founded upon a time-honoured science fiction scenario the movie also clearly articulates the sense of global peril which is typical of much of the cultural production of our current times, manifested in fears about ecological catastrophe, terrorist attacks, and the anthropocene, etc. Another of its crisis-points is also ‘very 2016’: its ability to use science fiction tropes to express an anxiety about how liberal values are in danger of being overtaken by a self-interested, forceful, intolerant kind of politics. Arrival is as much a work of ‘hu-fi’ as it is ‘sci-fi’, that is, ‘Humanities fiction’, a film which uses Chiang’s original novella to convey a message about the restorative potential of ‘Humanities values’ in the face of a new global threat.
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Manning, Pascale M. "“There is nothing human in nature”." Nineteenth-Century Literature 74, no. 4 (2020): 473–501. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2020.74.4.473.
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Pascale M. Manning, “‘There is nothing human in nature’: Denying the Anthropocene in Richard Jefferies” (pp. 473–501) This essay contends that the work of the nineteenth-century British writer and naturalist Richard Jefferies embodies both a recognition and a radical denial of the Anthropocene, expressing a nascent form of the ambivalence that stalks our contemporary recognitions and misrecognitions of the human in/and nature. Drawing upon a range of Jefferies’s writings—both his essays and his autobiography in addition to his fiction—it argues that there exists in Jefferies’s work a recurring vein of anti-ecological thought, particularly evidenced in the way it frequently depicts strict boundary lines, whether between agricultural and urban spaces, between civilization and wild nature, or between the human and the natural world. Taking issue with recent ecocritical accounts of Jefferies’s post-apocalyptic novel After London (1885), this essay rereads Jefferies’s novel in light of the wider range of his writings to argue that it is most usefully read not as a proto-ecological rebuke to the unsustainability of human agro-industrial practices, nor as a prophetic evocation of a world re-greened by the collapse of those practices, but rather as the irresolute culmination of a career spent both testifying to the essential inviolability of nature and bearing witness to the mounting evidence of anthropogenic rupture.
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Thiel, Tamiko. "Gardens of the Anthropocene // Jardines del Antropoceno." Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 8, no. 2 (2017): 193–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.37536/ecozona.2017.8.2.1890.
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Augmented Reality Installation in public space by Tamiko Thiel, 2016 – 2017: http://tamikothiel.com/gota/. Originally commissioned for the Seattle Art Museum Olympic Sculpture Park in summer 2016. The augmented reality (AR) installation Gardens of the Anthropocene posits a science fiction future in which native aquatic and terrestrial plants have mutated to cope with the increasing unpredictable and erratic climate swings. The plants in the installation are all derived from actual native plants in and around the Olympic Sculpture Park that are tolerant respectively to drought on land or to warming sea waters, and are therefore expected to adapt to the increasing temperatures to come. Beyond this actual scientific basis, however, the artwork takes artistic license to imagine a surreal, dystopian scenario in which plants are "mutating" to breach natural boundaries: from photosynthesis of visible light to feeding off of mobile devices' electromagnetic radiation, from extracting nutrients from soil to feeding off man-made structures, and to transgressing boundaries between underwater and dry land, between reactive flora and active fauna. Gardens of the Anthropocene has been eradicated in Seattle, but as the plants are native also to the San Francisco Bay Area, they have relocated to the Stanford University campus, between Memorial Auditorium and Hoover Tower, around the Hoover Fountain. Also, installations of red algae have been discovered on the East Coast of the USA, in Brooklyn, NY and Salem, MA. Resumen Instalación de Realidad Aumentada en espacio público por Tamiko Thiel, 2016 – 2017: http://tamikothiel.com/gota/. Encargado originalmente para el Parque de Escultura Olímpica del Museo de Arte de Seattle en el verano de 2016. La instalación de realidad aumentada (RA) Jardines del Antropoceno plantea un futuro de ciencia ficción en el que las plantas acuáticas y terrestres nativas han mutado para lidia con los cambios climáticos cada vez más impredecibles. Todas las plantas de la instalación provienen de plantas nativas reales del Parque de Escultura Olímpica y sus alrededores, que son tolerantes a la sequía en tierra o a las aguas marinas cada vez más cálidas, y que por lo tanto se espera que se adapten a las temperaturas en aumento que están por venir. Sin embargo, más allá de esta base científica real, la obra artística se toma la licencia de imaginar un escenario surrealista y distópico en el que las plantas “mutan” para romper barreras naturales: desde la fotosíntesis de la luz visible hasta nutrirse de la radiación electromagnética de dispositivos móviles, desde extraer nutrientes del suelo hasta alimentar estructuras hechas por el hombre, y hasta transgredir fronteras entre el agua y la tierra seca, entre flora radiactiva y fauna activa. Jardines del Antropoceno ha desaparecido de Seattle, pero como las plantas también son nativas de la zona de la bahía de San Francisco, han sido recolocadas en el campus de la Universidad de Stanford, entre el Memorial Auditorium y la Torre Hoover, alrededor de la Fuente Hoover. Además, se han descubierto instalaciones de algas rojas en la Costa Este de EEUU, en Brooklyn, NY y Salem, MA.
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Wiame, Aline. "Gilles Deleuze and Donna Haraway on Fabulating the Earth." Deleuze and Guattari Studies 12, no. 4 (2018): 525–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/dlgs.2018.0329.
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Inspired by Ursula Le Guin's ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, contemporary feminist writing in the social sciences and the humanities has been characterised by a strong renewal of interest in storytelling, as is evidenced by the works of Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway among others. How can storytelling grow with and beyond its literary origin to become a political and heuristic tool? And how does the Anthropocene – our specific geologic epoch – require the renewal of the means of expression of such an old tool as storytelling, so that it becomes a human and nonhuman process? To answer those questions, Deleuze's and Haraway's takes on ‘fabulation’ are intermingled along three lines: the part played by storytelling in the construction of earthly knowledges, the imbrication of speculation and politics, and the nonhuman dimension of fabulation that allows for the liberation of forces of life repressed by an anthropocentric approach.
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Higgins, Marc, Blue Mahy, Rouhollah Aghasaleh, and Patrick Enderle. "Patchworking Response-ability in Science and Technology Education." Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology 10, no. 2-3 (2019): 356–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.7577/rerm.3683.
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Within science and technology education, concepts of justice, in/equity, and ethics within science education are simultaneously ubiquitous, necessary, yet un(der)theorized. Consequently, the potential for reproducing and reifying systems of power remains ever present. In response, there is a recent but growing movement within science and technology education that follows the call by Kayumova and colleagues (2019) to move “from empowerment to response-ability.” It is a call to collectively organize, reconfigure, and reimagine science and technology education by taking seriously critiques of Western modern science and technology from its co-constitutive exteriority (e.g., feminist critiques). Herein, we pursue the (re)opening of responsiveness with/in methodology by juxtaposing differential, partial, and situated accounts of response-ability: de/colonizing the Anthropocene in science teacher education in Canada (Higgins); speculative fiction at the science-ethics nexus in secondary schooling in Australia (Mahy); and a reciprocal model for teaching and learning computational competencies with Latinx youth in the US (Aghasaleh and Enderle).
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Hamraie, Aimi. "Alterlivability." Environmental Humanities 12, no. 2 (2020): 407–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/22011919-8623197.
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Abstract This article responds to two diverging notions of “livability”: the normative New Urbanist imaginary of livable cities, where the urban good life manifests in neoliberal consumer cultures, green gentrification, and inaccessible infrastructures, and the feminist and disability concept of livable worlds, such as those in which nonnormate life thrives. Whereas the former ought to broaden its notion of “lives worth living,” the latter would benefit from a more specific theory of design—the making and remaking of more livable worlds. In response, this article offers the concept of “alterlivability,” a design philosophy grounded in permaculture ethics. Drawing on two novels by ecofeminist writer Starhawk—The Fifth Sacred Thing (1994) and City of Refuge (2016)—the article explores the genre of speculative design fiction for its insights into prototyping more livable futures in the Anthropocene. Starhawk’s novels illustrate alterlivability as a set of political commitments, design methodologies, and spatial forms that place disabled, racialized, and poor people at the center of alterlivable worlds.
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Hauke, Alexandra. "A Woman by Nature? Darren Aronofsky’s mother! as American Ecofeminist Gothic." Humanities 9, no. 2 (2020): 45. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h9020045.
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In this essay, I discuss Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 feature film mother! in the context of an intersectional approach to ecofeminism and the American gothic genre. By exploring the histories of ecofeminism, the significances of the ecogothic, and the Puritan origins of American gothic fiction, I read the movie as a reiteration of both a global ecophobic and an American national narrative, whose biblical symbolism is rooted in the patriarchal logic of Christian theology, American history, female suffering, and environmental crisis. mother! emerges as an example of a distinctly American ecofeminist gothic through its focus on and subversion of the essentialist equation of women and nature as feminized others, by dipping into the archives of feminist literary criticism, and by raising ecocritical awareness of the dangers of climate change across socio-cultural and anthropocentric categories. Situating Aronofsky’s film within traditions of American gothic and ecofeminist literatures from colonial times to the present moment, I show how mother! moves beyond a maternalist fantasy rooted in the past and towards a critique of the androcentric ideologies at the core of the 21st-century Anthropocene.
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Peoples, Columba, and Tim Stevens. "At the outer limits of the international: Orbital infrastructures and the technopolitics of planetary (in)security." European Journal of International Security 5, no. 3 (2020): 294–314. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/eis.2020.9.
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AbstractAs staples of science fiction, space technologies, much like outer space itself, have often been regarded as being ‘out there’ objects of international security analysis. However, as a growing subset of security scholarship indicates, terrestrial politics and practices are ever more dependent on space technologies and systems. Existing scholarship in ‘astropolitics’ and ‘critical astropolitics’ has tended to concentrate on how such technologies and systems underpin and impact the dynamics of military security, but this article makes the case for wider consideration of ‘orbital infrastructures’ as crucial to conceptions and governance of planetary security in the context of the ‘Anthropocene’. It does so by outlining and analysing in detail Earth Observation (EO) and Near-Earth Object (NEO) detection systems as exemplary cases of technological infrastructures for ‘looking in’ on and ‘looking out’ for forms of planetary insecurity. Drawing on and extending recent theorisations of technopolitics and of Large Technical Systems, we argue that EO and NEO technologies illustrate, in distinct ways, the extent to which orbital infrastructures should be considered not only part of the fabric of contemporary international security but as particularly significant within and even emblematic of the technopolitics of planetary (in)security.