“So what are the legends/we tell ourselves today?” asks Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner in her poem “Utilomar,” which opens with her nightmare of “the world flooded,” a tangible threat in the context of the Marshall Islands, which face inundation as a result of rising sea levels and global warming. This module will take up Jetnil-Kijiner’s call to explore the stories and legends we tell ourselves about climate and the future, examining contemporary representations of climate emergency and environmental crisis across a range of genres and geographies. Drawing on critical frameworks from the environmental humanities, postcolonial ecocriticism, energy humanities, petrocultures, resource criticism, ecopoetics, and popular cultural studies, the module will explore the capacity of different literary forms, such as speculative fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and the global novel, to represent climate change and the ‘slow violence’ of environmental crisis. We will compare texts by writers of different ethnicities from multiple regions, including British, North American, and postcolonial writing from the Global South.
Reading these texts, we will concentrate on certain key questions, such as how do literary texts represent the entanglement of race, class, or gender with climate crisis and explore the ways in which social and environmental justice are intertwined? What capacity do literary texts have to imagine alternative futures or relations to nature? How might these narratives help provide a framework for how we think about real-world environmental issues? How do imaginaries of environment and climate change vary across different regions and periods? How does literary production from outside of North American and Western Europe challenge Euro-American conceptions of ecology, resources, and climate adaptation? Examples of potential writers may include Kim Stanley Robinson, Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Duanwad Pimwana, Nnedi Okorafor, Joanna Kavenna, David Mitchell, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Tishani Doshi, Joy Harjo, Kathleen Jamie, and Yun Ko-eun.