Talk: The Securitisation of American Climate Fiction

The Securitisation of American Climate Fiction

Climate (crisis) fiction (cli-fi) has been theorised as a crucial wake-up for affluent readers, and as providing important roadmaps towards sustainable futures. By reading cli-fi, this scholarship proposes, people living in a world energised by fossil fuels can begin charting a new course for humanity.

This talk challenges this general view of cli-fi by tracing its American genealogy back to early settler colonial writing, and by exploring its relationship to a dominant tradition of narrative that centres on the need to secure resources such as arable land, coal and oil.

When understood as building on this tradition, much of what has been termed cli-fi can be seen to perceive the climate crisis as an emergency for American capitalist modernity rather than for the planet or for global human society.

Rather than promoting new ways of being in the world, such cli-fi texts understand widespread socio-ecological crisis as a (military) engagement opportunity. Thus, the resolution to the prevailing crisis is described as supplied by the institution that produced it in the first place: American capitalist modernity. In this way, American cli-fi culture can be described as involved in a project to securitise American capitalist hegemony, rather than the planet or its people.

Bio

Johan Höglund is professor of English at Linnaeus University, a founding member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, and co-director of the research cluster Ecology, Culture and Coloniality (ECCo) at Linnaeus University, Sweden.

He has published extensively on the relationship between popular culture, colonialism, and extractive capitalism, with a particular focus on Gothic and science fiction. He is the author of The American Climate Emergency Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (Routledge, 2016), and co-editor of Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: Gothic and the Anthropocene (UMinn Press, 2022), Nordic Gothic (Manchester UP, 2020), B-Movie Gothic: International Perspectives (Edinburgh UP, 2018), Animal Horror Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), among other texts.

Time and place: 

Room: OD Lysningen Ø10-301-1
Date: 7 December
Time: 12.15 - 2.00 pm

The talk is organized by the Center for Culture and Technology.

No registration needed. The event will not be hybrid.

For further questions, please contact Rune Graulund at graulund@sdu.dk