Cli-Fi and Class: Socioeconomic Justice in Contemporary American Climate Fiction

by Debra J. Rosenthal (Editor), Jason de Lara Molesky (Editor), Lisa Ottum (Contribution by), Martín Premoli (Contribution by), B. Jamieson Stanley (Contribution by)

Overview

Since its emergence in the late twentieth century, climate fiction—or cli-fi—has concerned itself as much with economic injustice and popular revolt as with rising seas and soaring temperatures. Indeed, with its insistent focus on redressing social disparities, cli-fi might reasonably be classified as a form of protest literature. As environmental crises escalate and inequality intensifies, literary writers and scholars alike have increasingly scrutinized the dual exploitations of the earth’s ecosystems and the socioeconomically disadvantaged.

Cli-Fi and Class focuses on the representation of class dynamics in climate-change narratives. With fifteen essays on the intersection of the economic and the ecological—addressing works ranging from the novels of Joseph Conrad, Cormac McCarthy, and Octavia Butler to the film Black Panther and the Broadway musical Hadestown —this collection unpacks the complex ways economic exploitation impacts planetary well-being, and the ways climatic change shapes those inequities in turn.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813950259
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	10/09/2023
Series:	Under the Sign of Nature
Pages:	262
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.25(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Debra J. Rosenthal is Professor of English at John Carroll University and the author of Performatively Speaking: Speech and Action in Antebellum American Literature. Jason de Lara Molesky is a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University and Assistant Professor of English at Saint Louis University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. Class Structure and Resource Extraction

Hadestown and Other Myths for the Anthropocene: Company Towns and Proletarian Traditions in US Climate Fiction / Jason de Lara Molesky

Burnout: Cli-Fi and Exhaustion / Lisa Ottum

Resource Utopia and Dystopia: Excavating Class in Afrofuturist Cli-Fi Film / Martín Premoli and B. Jamieson Stanley

Dreaming a Decolonized Climate: Indigenous Technologies and Relations of Class and Kinship in Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves / Jessica Cory

Part II. Class Differentiation and Climate Risk

Climate-Change Fiction and Poverty Studies: Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, Diaz's "Monstro," and Bacigalupi's "The Tamarisk Hunter" / Debra J. Rosenthal

Learning to Survive: Place-Based Education in Strange as This Weather Has Been and Parable of the Sower / Jennifer Horwitz

Settler Apocalypses: Race, Class, and the Erasure of Indigenous Resilience in Alaskan Cli-Fi / Jennifer Schell

Black: A Speculative Almanac for the End of the World / Kimberly Bain

Part III. Class Privilege and Climate Anxiety

Class and Revolution in the Climate Fictions of Kim Stanley Robinson: Transitions to Postcapitalism / Andrew Milner

Heartland of Darkness: Nostalgia and Class in the Climate Fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi / Jeffrey M. Brown

Whose Odds?: The Absence of Climate Justice in American Climate Fiction of the 2000s and 2010s / Matthew Schneider-Mayerson

Cli-Fi and the Crisis of the Middle Class / Magdalena Maczynska

Homelessness in Lauren Groff's Florida Fiction: Climate Change and Displacement / Teresa A. Goddu

Epilogue: What has Changed Since Anthropocene Fictions? / Adam Trexler

Notes on Contributors

Index

What People are Saying About This

Ben De Bruyn

This collection fills an important gap and helps to reorient the debate about the climate crisis by underlining the fast and slow violence of structural poverty as well as catastrophic weather. Offering thought-provoking analyses of contemporary writers such as Lauren Groff, Octavia Butler, and Barbara Kingsolver, the contributors demonstrate that the cultural debate on the Anthropocene and on climate justice needs to include an ecopoverty lens and they further explain how climate narratives can help us to articulate new environmentalisms of the poor and of the eroding middle class. A timely, original, and valuable contribution.

Editorial Reviews

This collection fills an important gap and helps to reorient the debate about the climate crisis by underlining the fast and slow violence of structural poverty as well as catastrophic weather. Offering thought-provoking analyses of contemporary writers such as Lauren Groff, Octavia Butler, and Barbara Kingsolver, the contributors demonstrate that the cultural debate on the Anthropocene and on climate justice needs to include an ecopoverty lens and they further explain how climate narratives can help us to articulate new environmentalisms of the poor and of the eroding middle class. A timely, original, and valuable contribution.

Ben De Bruyn