This session considers joy and sorrow as a mode of speculating about climate futures based in comparative ethnic American literary traditions. Drawing primarily from Latinx and Indigenous literatures and cultures, the authors collectively examine how futures based in processes of spiritualization, proleptic mourning, and disidentifications with Indigenous onto-epistemologies produce varieties of joy and sorrow in the anthropocene. The panelists seek to examine modes of futurity that are in excess of traditional models of environmental thinking, particularly as they relate to the tendency among mainstream Euro-American authors to lapse into melancholia, eco-pessimism, or postmodern absurdity.

Jocelyn Sears troubles the dystopian genre as it has absorbed the mounting climate crisis and the global rise of the far right. Sears claims that dystopian fiction has added an element of proleptic mourning—not just warning readers against dark futures to avoid, but also grieving that some negative transformations may be inescapable. She examines Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017) as a case study in such dystopic thinking. The apocalypse the text represents produces both dystopian and utopian possibilities to stage a complex interplay of optimism and pessimism in the face of planetary change.

In conversation with these ideas, Cathryn Merla-Watson interrogates how Adelina Anthony’s play The Beast of Times (2014) queerly allegorizes This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) to incite spiritual activism and radical acts of scripturalization. These forms of activism, Merla-Watson contends, are intended to unearth the racialized, classed, and gendered aspects of the anthropocene. In doing so, Merla-Watson argues that the play imagines a queer of color eschatology that demands bridging differences within and beyond the human—spirit work that begins to make sensible other kinds of decolonial pleasure, kinships, and modes of being and relating to engender forms of survivance in the anthropocene.

Karina Vado brings a feminist science studies lens to her considerations of Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s theories of mestizaje and questions of futurity. Vado engages the makings and evolution of Anzaldúa’s utopian and Chicanafuturist oeuvre. Borrowing from the lexicon of the animal, plant, and other life sciences, Vado argues that Anzaldúa’s adaptation of racialist biological metaphors (for instance, “grafting” and the “tree of life” image) informs her affiliative, speculative, and future-oriented “new terrains of mestizaje” to suture the biological with the cultural, the spiritual with the material, and the human with the nonhuman. Along the way, Vado argues that Anzaldúa reconceptualizes and expands our identities (racial or otherwise), our humanity, and our relationality to other beings/species.

Maia Gil’Adí will serve as the respondent for the panel, identifying linkages between the presentations and posing questions for the audience. David J. Vázquez will moderate the panel.