Climate Fiction & Empire
This course was developed with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Pathways program at Emory
ENG 388W / ENVS 385W
Spring 2023
Tu/Th 4:00 - 5:15 PM
Course Description:
We all experience climate change, but not equally. As a large and ever-growing body of research shows, the worst impacts of climate change intersect with and compound inequities that have to do with race, ethnicity, gender, class, and geography. Global empire, colonialism, settler colonialism, and capitalism laid the foundations for the inequitable distribution of climate change’s consequences.
This course begins with the conviction that literature relays the connections between empire and climate. How do the twinned histories of empire and climate change shape recent literature, and how does literature respond in turn? How does literary thought enable other forms of climate communication and activism? In this class, we will read multiethnic, Indigenous, and postcolonial authors, whose work partakes of what critics sometimes call climate fiction or “cli-fi.” An ever-growing niche in the literary field, cli-fi explores climate change’s past, present, and possible futures. Through science fictional dystopias, historical fiction, alternate histories, this course explore issues such as the history of colonialism and global empire, environmental racism, the rise of eco-fascism, and climate apartheid.
In this continuing writing course, students will learn to use traditional written assignments as the basis for community engaged and public facing writing. In collaboration with Emory Climate Talks, students will concentrate on developing multimodal projects like guest blog posts and podcast episodes for AmpliFIRE: Raising Voices against Rising Temperatures. The course will be of special interest to students who wish to investigate deeply the intersections of climate and empire—how our collective past has gotten us to where we are now—and who want to gain practical experience as climate change communicators.
Key Texts:
Novels for this course cover a wide range of genres—gothic, dystopia, historical fiction, alternate history, and science fiction. But they all might be called climate fiction or “cli fi,” a genre whose major forms and traits we will seek to illuminate and define. Additionally, this course prioritizes Black, ethnic, postcolonial, and Indigenous authors, as well as authors from regions increasingly experiencing formal or informal conditions of climate apartheid. Readings include:
Climate Fiction & Empire Podcast Episodes:
Podcast episodes are shared with permission of their creators, the students of ENG 388W/ENVS 385W.
