In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), novelist Amitav Ghosh claims a central role for fiction in response to climate change, but dismisses science and speculative fiction as too marginal to meet this challenge. Numerous critics, including Ursula K. Heise, have taken Ghosh to task for this claim, recognizing a long history of engagement in these genres with historical crises. Following Ghosh, recent scholarship has begun to consider these relationships, including Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (2015), Antonia Mehnert’s Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in American Literature (2016), and Astrid Bracke’s Climate Crisis and the 21st-century British Novel (2017). In dialogue with these critical works, this panel seeks to demonstrate the serious engagement of speculative and science fiction novels with the realities of climate change. In particular, we focus on minoritized imaginings of the non-human that expose the racial, economic, and gendered biases embedded in the historical conception of the human that is central to debates in climate change about species and futurity.

The idea of the human, as species and as actor/agent, is the foundation of the oft-debated term Anthropocene used to describe the era of human-driven climate change. Beginning in the Enlightenment, the human came to be defined by autonomy, rationality, intellect, and language, but as historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued in “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009), climate change forces us to reexamine such Western beliefs and ideas about identity. All four papers on this panel attempt to shift focus toward non- or post-human beings in order to critique the ideologies that have long kept certain groups from being granted the status of the “human.” This includes humans who have been colonized and enslaved, as well as animals, plants, and the climate itself, which have been rendered as inert materials rather than agentic forces. When taken together, these papers make a strong case for the role of global speculative and science fiction in offering critiques of the ideologies that have led to the current climate crisis, as well as fulfilling Ghosh’s claims for the imaginative powers of fiction to consider alternate futures.

In “Decolonizing Climate Fiction,” Magdalena Mączyńska draws connections between the contemporary climate fiction of American and British writers Kim Stanley Robinson, Nathaniel Rich, and Ian McEwan, with the pioneering Victorian work of Richard Jefferies. She explores how these works make visible histories of colonial exploitation and acknowledge the uneven distribution of environmental culpability. She further considers how these writers decenter human experience without ignoring the continuing realities of social and racial injustice. Without addressing these vital questions, she argues, both “cli-fi” and posthumanism risk dangerous erasures of indigenous histories and neocolonial struggles, and miss the chance to confront, and move beyond, the violent pasts that have delivered us to the troubling present.

In “Zombies, Anemones, and the (Post) Human in Climate Fiction in Caribbean Literature,” Mary Ann Gosser Esquilín brings together two contemporary novels: Tú, la oscuridad (In the Palm of Darkness) by Cuban-Puerto Rican writer Mayra Montero and Dominican writer Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé. In the former, she reads the zombification of the public amid an environmental collapse of the Haitian state in light of the longer colonial history of racial and environmental disaster in the region beginning with Columbus. In the latter, these same themes converge in the lives of the protagonist Alcide Figueroa across different historical periods. The novel is set against a fictional climatic disaster in 2024 that reveals the dire postcolonial eco-realities of the two nations on the island of Hispaniola. In Indiana’s novel, the anemone (which reproduces asexually) becomes symbolic of an alternative futurity. Both novels reimagine what it means to be (post)human in the wake of colonizing forces that are historical and ongoing.

In “Climate Fiction and the Ice Age: Johannes V. Jensen’s The Long Journey (1922),” Michael Gaffney traces a colonial and geologic history of climate change and its racialization to argue for “cli-fi” as part of a longer tradition of fiction that represents human life against large-scale changes to the planet. Jensen’s overt aim is to rewrite the garden of Eden myth, resituating human history from a religious story to a Darwinian parable about human survival in a constantly changing ecosystem; when the ice age arrives, Jensen’s humans must, like all species, adapt. Gaffney contends that Jensen advances a racist vision of climatic determinism. The ice age, for Jensen, stands as a necessary evolutionary condition of human progress, and it explains European modernity, hegemony, and racial superiority. That Jensen’s climate Darwinism enabled him to articulate a vision of history consistent with white supremacy points toward the serious dangers involved in abstracting humans into a generalizable “species” in climatological thinking.

In “The Alienation of the Human: Motherhood at the End of the World in Octavia Butler’s trilogy Lilith’s Brood,” Kaitlin Mondello claims that the oft-discussed future of the human species in the discourse of climate change frequently occludes the role of the mother upon which these concepts depend. Her paper considers Butler’s Afrofuturist decentering of the human through the titular figure Lilith who grapples with her role as a progenitor of a new species (half-human, half-alien) after humans destroy the Earth’s climate and most of its inhabitants. Butler alludes to the historically fraught role of the mother in the forced perpetuation of the colonial slave trade, as well as in ongoing animal captivity and breeding, in order to highlight the various that ways that race, gender, and species have been used to render certain beings as “alien” from ontological and juridical definitions of the human.