Johan Höglund gives a guest lecture within the english research seminar series on "Settler Fiction, Petrofiction and Climate Fiction: Extractivism, Narrative and the Planetary Emergency in American Literature". All interested are welcome!
Following a very influential article in the IGBP Newsletter by Crutzen and Stormer’s (2000), the most common denominator for the current epoch of endemic climate emergency has been the Anthropocene. This term has helped people realize the enormity of the transformation of the Earth System that is currently taking place, but, as Eileen Crist (2013), Jason W. Moore (2015), Andreas Malm (2017), T. J. Demos (2017) and many others have observed, the concept risks erasing the enormous difference in environmental impact between people in the Global South and in the Global North. As Moore’s work reveals, the engine of the planetary emergency is not humanity as a species, but the system of capitalism so that the ongoing geological epoch is more appropriately named the Capitalocene.
Thinking about the climate crisis through the Capitalocene instead of via the Anthropocene has great consequences for how the climate crisis is resolved. What is needed, as environmental scientist Johan Rockström (2015) observes, is “a deep shift in the logic of development away from the assumption of infinite growth toward a paradigm of development and human prosperity within Earth limits” (7). Recognizing the systemic nature of the climate emergency also has profound consequences for how fiction narrates the present crisis and its history, as well as for scholarship on such fiction. While the dominant model used in literary criticism so far has been the Anthropocene (Trexler 2015, Ghosh 2016, Clark 2015, Clark 2012, DeLoughrey 2019), this paper discusses how the shift towards the Capitalocene affects the writing of literary criticism and literary history. In conversation with work by Mark Niblett (2020), the Warwick Research Collective (2015) and Malm, this paper discusses how early settler colonial writing as well as nineteenth and twentieth century petrofiction in America register and narrate the relationship between settler capitalism, human society and ecology, in the process creating the foundation out of which Climate Fiction emerges.
About: Johan Höglund is professor of English at Linnaeus University and former director of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He has published extensively on how popular culture narrates colonialism, neocolonialism, and extractive capitalism. His most recent publication includes The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (Routledge, 2014) and is currently working on a monograph Militarizing the Planetary Emergency: American Fiction in the Capitalocene.