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

Debra J. Rosenthal (Edited by), Jason de Lara Molesky (Edited by)

9780813950259

Paperback / softback, published 9 October 2023

262 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.272 kg

“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, UCLouvain, author of The Novel and the Multispecies Soundscape

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.

• Introduction
• Hadestown and Other Myths for the Anthropocene: Company Towns and Proletarian Traditions in US Climate Fiction
• Burnout: Cli-Fi and Exhaustion
• Resource Utopia and Dystopia: Excavating Class in Afrofuturist Cli-Fi Film
• Dreaming a Decolonized Climate: Indigenous Technologies and Relations of Class and Kinship in Cherie Dimaline'
  s The Marrow Thieves
• Climate-Change Fiction and Poverty Studies: Kingsolver'
  s Flight Behavior, Diaz'
  s "Monstro," and Bacigalupi'
  s "The Tamarisk Hunter"
• Learning to Survive: Place-Based Education in Strange as This Weather Has Been and Parable of the Sower
• Settler Apocalypses: Race, Class, and the Erasure of Indigenous Resilience in Alaskan Cli-Fi
• Black: A Speculative Almanac for the End of the World
• Class and Revolution in the Climate Fictions of Kim Stanley Robinson: Transitions to Postcapitalism
• Heartland of Darkness: Nostalgia and Class in the Climate Fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi
• Whose Odds? The Absence of Climate Justice in American Climate Fiction of the 2000s and 2010s
• Cli-Fi and the Crisis of the Middle Class
• Homelessness in Lauren Groff'
  s Florida Fiction: Climate Change and Displacement
• Epilogue: What has Changed Since Anthropocene Fictions?
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Index