From Settler Fiction to Climate Fiction: Writing the Colonial Origins of the Climate Emergency

For the past 20 years, Crutzen and Stormer’s (2000) term Anthropocene has helped people realize the enormity of the catastrophic transformation of the Earth System that is currently taking place. However, as Eileen Crist (2013), Jason W. Moore (2015) and many others have observed, the concept suggests that the climate emergency has been caused by all humans equally. This not only e​rases the immense difference in environmental impact and suffering that exists between people in the Global South and in the Global North, and between wealthy and precarious communities generally, it also makes it difficult to usefully work towards more sustainable futures. To rethink the history of the climate emergency, and to create opportunities for climate action, John Bellamy Foster (2011), Donna Haraway (2016), Kathryn Yusoff (2018) and Moore have, in different ways, argued that the twin engine that has driven the planetary emergency for the past 400 years is not humanity as a species, but the conjoined system of colonialism and capitalism.

This lecture discusses what this argument means for the study of American literature. How has literature and other media types narrated, boosted, obscured or critiqued this ecocidal, imperial and capitalist history? To address this question, the lecture departs from a long tradition that compartmentalizes literature into intellectual and aesthetic epochs and instead takes seriously Patricia Yaeger’s (2011) suggestion that literary texts can be sorted according to “the energy sources that made them possible” (306). This lecture utilizes this suggestion to read American literary history as made possible by, but also narrating, the extraction and leveraging of militarized energies, from the explosive power of sulfuric gunpowder that aided in the colonization of America, to coal, to petrol, and on to plutonium. When the American literary past is refigured in this way, it becomes possible to see how climate fiction, defined here as a mode rather than as a discrete genre, comes out of a long tradition of writing that began with the violent settlement of the New World.

About: Johan Höglund is professor of English at Linnaeus University and former director of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He has published extensively on how popular culture narrates colonialism, neocolonialism, and extractive capitalism. He is the author of The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (Routledge, 2014), and the co-editor of several scholarly collections and special journal issues, including Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: Gothic and the Anthropocene (UMinn Press, 2022), Nordic Gothic (Manchester UP, 2020), “Nordic Colonialisms” for Scandinavian Studies (2019), B-Movie Gothic (Edinburgh UP, 2018), Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism (Palgrave McMillan, 2015), and Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires (Palgrave McMillan, 2012). He is currently working on a monograph title Militarizing the Planetary Emergency: American Fiction in the Capitalocene.