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Experian.
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Welcome New Books Network.
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Pauline Heinrichs. I'm a lecturer in War Studies, Climate and Energy at King's College London. This podcast episode is presented by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group. Today we welcome Carl Death, who joined the University of Manchester in August 2013 as a senior lecturer in international political economy. After four years in the Department of International Politics in Aberystwyth and a year in the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University, Karl conducts research in South Africa, Tanzania and the US and his research focuses on environmental politics in Africa, with a particular interest in critical and postcolonial approaches. His latest book, African Climate Futures, published with Oxford University Press, shows how climate change futures are imagined in Africa and by Africans, and how these future visions shape political debates and struggles in the present. It is for that reason that we are super excited today to talk to Carl, as this is the book we will be talking about. So thank you Carl for joining us.
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C
Thank you very much for having me. It's lovely to be here.
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B
Not at all. I usually start a discussion with the question of why now? So, Carl, tell us why now and how did the book come to be?
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C
Well, thanks very much for that introduction, and as I said, it's lovely to be here. So why now? So I think a lot of people are probably aware of the boom in what's called climate fiction, or sometimes clifi, which is a slightly ugly term. But anyway, there are anthologies, there are prizes. It's kind of a hard to define field of literature, but I saw a stat the other day that said it. Last year in 2025, 3.5% of all published fiction fell into the genre of climate fiction, which I'm not quite sure how you calculate that, but even so, I think lots of us in this field are aware that there's a burgeoning anthology, short stories, even films and novels in that area. And I don't think this is surprising because when we see what's going on around us in terms of extreme weather events or ecological crises, or even a kind of a general sense of anxiety, frustration, even anger with the state of our climate politics, I think people are turning, writers and readers are turning to climate fiction to try and help make sense of that. And I've been doing research and teaching on African politics and African environmental politics for 20 years or so now. And so I've also been interested in and reading and aware of growing numbers of African authors writing climate fiction as well, and African science fiction and speculative fiction more generally. And none of this is new. It's building on long histories of African authors writing very successful, important work in speculative fiction. But I think there's a rising number of books and contributions from African authors in this field as well. However, I think a lot of those African stories about climate futures tend to be somewhat marginalized or invisible or certainly not in the mainstream of global conversations about global climate politics or even global climate fiction. There are some exceptions. Last year, the first prize of climate Fiction prize went to a Nigerian author, Abidare, for Ansaw Rohr. But in general, I think apart from quite stereotypical, cliched images of African dystopia, environmental catastrophes as somehow kind of symbolically prefiguring what the rest of the world could be like after climate change in general, I think African characters and plots and authors and stories are kind of marginalized in discussions about global climate politics and global climate futures. And I wanted to use this research to explore some of the more diverse, interesting, challenging, countercultural, radical stories that emerges from African authors about visions of climate futures. And I guess the other reason for why now is a more personal one. A lot of my research had been doing field work talking to environmental activists over the years, and then I had young children, and I wanted to explore forms of research that were more amenable to childcare and caring role at home. And so I'd been reading a lot of climate fiction and African climate fiction and looking for ways to bring that into my research. And actually this book became rather more reflective or even autobiographical in parts, as I began to reflect on the role of stories and how we educate and teach our children, how we narrate our own lives and research trajectories and careers, and how we think about our relationship with our own families and parents, and how we think about the future as well. So that all of these things came together in this research project.
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B
Brilliant. A long way, I would say, from Amitav Ghosh's initial assessment that we had failed to imagine climate change in at least fiction in any meaningful way. I think that was just 10 years ago or so. So things have changed in some 3% is obviously still not that much. These discussions in this podcast rarely are about methodological choices, but you've just alluded to that a little bit. What I really loved about your book is the idea to study political strategies and fictional texts side by side and in many ways actually giving them the same credit in reference to how our political world is constituted and how we analyze it. And it is of course in part surprising that we've taken some time to do this and it's not entirely excluded. But why do you think there is often a reluctance in mainstream scholarship to do that kind of level or hierarchy of methodological choices? And why was this set up important for you?
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C
Yeah, thanks. I think you're right that there is some kind of reluctance or at least trepidation in some disciplines and some departments about doing this. And of course there are people who've done similar things and have been doing similar things for many years and I've been inspired by and trying to build on people like Audra Mitchell or in climate fiction, Manjana Milkerright, and in science and speculative fiction more generally, people like Jutta Welders or Roland Bleikke who've been doing something similar, bringing fictional texts alongside policy texts for many years. But I think you're right that there is there's still a kind of reluctance in serious scholarship to engage seriously with cultural texts, films, novels, short stories perhaps, with the exception of if we're doing hard ideological critique of the latest Hollywood film. I mean, that seems that's a task for proper serious critical scholarship. But when we're looking for kind of theoretical inspiration or countercultural visions or alternative subjugated knowledges and these sorts of texts, then I think you're right, there is something of a reluctance there. And I think this is also partly related to the sphere of, I guess, policy studies or policy interventions. Whereas I mean from your work as well, I mean in the policy world, being realistic, being hard headed, being not too theoretical or not too academic are all things that are often quite valorized. And there is a bit of, for me, there's a bit of an enjoyable irony here that when you're reading net zero policy strategies, long term low carbon trajectories, I mean, sometimes these seem just or even more just as fantastical or even more fantastical as some of the science fiction texts. There are these quite implausible Projections about the rate of energy transitions or reliance on unproven technologies like carbon capture and storage, or these quite fanciful political scenarios in which any kind of opposition is invisible or kind of dwindles away. And I think this is actually why it's really important and interesting to read these kind of texts alongside each other, and treating both of them as having similar kind of plot lines or accounts of change or types of characters that crop up can illuminate each other. And I was particularly interested in the gaps and omissions you get in both these sorts of texts. I think it was important as well for another reason. And I'm sure some people reading the book, especially the second half, will probably realize that I really grew to love immersing myself in these fictional worlds and exploring the worlds that the authors create and thinking about the sort of implications we can draw out of it for political theory and so on. But I didn't want to entirely stay within this zone for the book. I think in our current political conjuncture, it is really important, important to think about what we might take from this sort of discussion into an explicit lessons for climate politics as it's normally conceived in terms of climate policies and policy making and strategies. And that's why this book is definitely an attempt to be interdisciplinary between international politics and environmental studies and African studies and English literature, rather than a move away from politics into another discipline.
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B
Great, thank you. It struck me as important because in part, seeing different African authors as being able and capable to respond emotionally to a certain political condition, but not with their own climate scientists and with their own strategies and agency and political processes is as sidelining, at least scientifically, as it would be for fiction. And it's important that both of those contributions are centered. The theoretical contribution centers a lot on the idea of the imaginary. And I wanted to explore a bit further that very notion. In part, I wanted to hear more about what role it plays in contemporary analysis and why it felt like the right angle for you, I think, and that might be misreading it. There is a tendency of suggesting that imaginaries are purely a positive thing, or something hopeful, but in many ways it's also a more complicated concept, and that it's more than hope in imaginaries would suggest. For example, you describe whiteness as a system of thought referencing Gabai, which suggests, of course, that imaginaries can also hold systems of power in place. So how would you describe that difficult relationship of the imaginary to power structures in the future?
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C
Absolutely. And the relationship between imaginaries and policy texts, cultural texts and power relations is absolutely at the center of this. And the way in which these both challenge and reinforce, or can both challenge and reinforce dominant power structures in different ways is really at the heart of what the book's trying to explore. So you're right, the concept of the imaginary is really central to the argument that I'm trying to make in the book. And I found it useful because it's related to obviously, but broader than the concept of imagination, which often gets reduced to a kind of attribute of the individual. And I agree here especially, you often get this quite simplistic or naive vesting of hope in the imaginative capacity of humans. Often it often seems to be great men in the kind of dominant story. For example, I mean, we could just think hypothetically about a tech entrepreneur saying, well, we don't really need to worry about climate change because the power of the human imagination to overcome challenges will sort all this out in the end. And they usually have some kind of individual genius entrepreneur inventor in mind. And. And so this kind of mythologizing of the human imagination within dominant narratives of capitalism, I think is really problematic and dangerous. Whereas the imaginary is something else here in the book. I try to define it as a socially shared and to some degree institutionally supported or stabilized mental picture. And it's a concept with a long and radical history. So people like Cornelius Castoridis used it in a sense of kind of like a thick ideological function for constituting society. And what I try and do in the book is read both fictional texts and policy strategies as reflections of broader eco political imaginaries, especially those that are widely read and discussed and reviewed and talked about. So I'm interested in ecopolitical imaginaries and views of climate futures. But the imaginary can also invoke certain visions, pictures, mental pictures about the past and the present as well. And of course, there are lots of other imaginaries that are not centrally concerned with environmental or climate themes. And so in this kind of picture of society or the world in which we live as being constituted through multiple, often competing and overlapping imaginaries, I'm closer to the way in which someone like Sheila Jasanoff uses socio technical imaginaries as compared to other theorists. I mean, Benedict Anderson is one of the most famous, and Charles Taylor, who tended to talk about kind of single national imaginaries as underpinning the possibility of society or a coherent national community, something like that. So absolutely yes, I think you can discuss things like whiteness as an imaginary. And it's imaginary because there are shared mental pictures or a worldview that's about more than just skin color. It's about encompassing what Clive Gabay calls a mythologized historical genius of white or Eurocentric civilization. And it's a really good example because it reminds us that imaginaries are by definition they have some degree of institutional support and stabilizing, they have a mutually reinforcing relationship with real material structures of power and wealth. And so imaginaries are not just something that exists in our mind abstracted from the material world.
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B
Great. In reference to the long term strategies or policy documents that you look at in one of your initial chapters, I remember talking to various negotiators from a number of African countries. And outside of the common critique of unfairness and a skewed international governance system, many negotiators voiced frustration with reporting targets and reports, in fact, precisely because they often remained almost imaginary, rather than focusing on implementation and actually implementing processes that would help and sustain some form of governance of climate effects, for example, your work on the limitations of long term strategies in your book is what I would love to ask a little bit more about next. How would you characterize those limitations? What's the fairy dust they're sprinkling on to their strategies and to what degree? Are they actually quite similar or foreshadow what you find in works of fiction?
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C
Yeah, thanks very much. You're right. There are a lot of limitations in these long term strategies more generally, not just in Africa. In fact, lots of the limitations that I argue can be seen in the long term strategies from places like Nigeria, South Africa, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and so on are, are, can also be seen in other long term strategies elsewhere. And this is one of the frustrations I have with contemporary climate politics. We're at a moment where we desperately need new maps for how to build changing relationships between ourselves and nature. And most of these strategies fall so far short of helping us think through and reflect to societies on what this changing relationship might be. I mean, they, they don't seem to live up to the term strategy for me in the sense of a political intervention or evaluation of strengths and weaknesses and goals in the current context. So a literary theorist, Matthew Ito, describes them as fetishistic substitutes for social action. And I think this is a really nice phrase. Merely compiling and completing and submitting the report itself is an indicator of progress and I think it's a sign line of how broken or at least the obstacles or the state of contemporary climate politics is, and I try not to shy away from that in the book. That is one of the motivations for writing and for bringing the discussion of climate fiction together with political strategies. It's really easy though, I think, for scholarship and activism to remain bogged down into this gap between rhetoric and reality or the kind of implementation crisis. And so what I tried to do in this part of the book is try to start from the perspective of well, we have these strategies. I mean the strategies I looked at were the forerunners of many more strategies that will follow on the rest of, from the rest from other African countries. These are some of the leading attempts to put together long term net zero strategies in Africa. We have them. What kind of space have they opened up? What do they tell us? What are the strengths and weaknesses of some of these documents? And there are some really interesting things in them. I mean they tell us that a lot of the technologies and what we know about sociopolitical reforms, there's a growing consensus around this. There are striking similarities in what lots of these strategies propose. There's nothing particular particularly shocking, that's in terms of what they set out, in terms of what's needed. They also show that for many of these countries, even places like South Africa and Nigeria, that are very heavily reliant on fossil fuels, these are countries that are also relatively well positioned in terms of natural resources to move away from fossil fuels, for example. But the limitations that I talk about in the book are at the level of the eco political imaginaries. And I don't think these strategies are very good at helping us to imagine what it would feel like to live through a massive social and economic and political and climate change. They're not very good at helping us think about how different people in different places at different times might experience these seismic shifts. And they certainly don't help us imagine what non human perspectives on a just transition or a climate crisis might be. And I think it's in these areas that climate fiction is really well placed to contribute to that conversation about what a just transition might be and how we might experience that and from all sorts of different perspectives. So towards the end of the book I do try to imagine what a long term strategy might look like if it was written by authors who'd been reading African futurist climate fiction. But whether this will have any traction in policy circles, I have no idea.
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C
Nine years of bring back the snack.
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D
Wrap and you've won.
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C
But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the Hot Honey Snack Wrap. Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can.
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B
Well, at least it's a good start. Let's see how it's going to be picked up. But it also reminds me of what in the context of nuclear weapons would call or these policy documents. In many ways is the illusion of managerial control over effects that are in many ways also genuinely unprecedented and baked into inequalities that in many ways are going to exacerbate the effects that are connected to them. It's interesting that you talk about this idea of the imaginary in response to materialities more broadly. I want you to ask how you anchored materialities in that in many ways, yes, imaginaries about climate futures is about bringing kind of the story into the picture, but in many ways climate change is also a materiality that kind of almost sits outside, at least initially, the story. How did you find ways of thinking about both together rather than separately?
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C
That's a really good question, and it's a really tricky question. You're right, of course, that climate change has a materiality that is outside and beyond these stories. These are stories about climate change, at least in some senses, and in different ways across the stories, they're only ever representations or interpretations of of a more extensive reality that exists beyond these stories as well. I mean, the crucial point for me, though, is that these representations have political effects and hence they have material effects as well. So when Biden or Trump or Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa or Bola Tinubu in Nigeria, when they tell a particular story, even if they don't phrase it in those terms, when they advance a particular narrative about climate change or about fossil fuels, these stories have material effects that themselves change things about future climates. And when storytellers like Kim Stanley Robinson or Nnedi Okorafor tell stories about climate change, this perhaps in only small ways, but it can change how, with the wider eco political imaginaries that change how climate change is understood and represented. And there are bigger materialities that escape our representations, but the way we make sense of them and understand them and translate Them into politics and power relations are always through representations, discourses and imaginaries. There is one more way of trying to. I was trying to think about tackling this question in the book, which is thinking about how stories at least give us avenues to explore forms of non human agency, action, materiality, if you want, whether that's in terms of something like Mother Earth or Gaian politics, or whether it's in terms of the agency of carbon itself. Or as in the very famous opening to one of the stories that I look at, Nnedi Okorafor's story Lagoon opens from the perspective of a swordfish attacking an oil pipeline. And so thinking about the way in which human, non human, post human, more than human, forms of being, an agency can be narrated by humans, for humans in stories gives us, I think, some interesting ways to explore some of these really tricky questions.
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B
Super fascinating. Also, it reminds me a lot of political discourses, for example, and the cost of action sidelining the cost of inaction, and for that reason producing materialities that then kind of produce these self fulfilling outcomes in a way, despite long term, of course, leading to disaster or more cost.
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C
Absolutely. And just one more thing, these books also are themselves material items. I mean, I'm still someone who likes to read a novel, at least in a physical copy. And I was trying to hold on to that sense as well. I was reading these books in a particular material context, either at home or in South Manchester where I live and work. And these are commodities as well, that have been produced often through trees that be cut down and have their own. They are commodities that have their own material life that goes beyond the simple, straightforward sense in which we often think of an imagined story. And so I wanted to try and hold onto that sense in the book as well.
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B
Absolutely. If we are zooming in on climate fiction a little more closely in the next chapter, you know, you started by asking why read climate fiction in the first place? So give us your breakdown. Why read climate fiction? What do stories do politically beyond what we just discussed? And can you tell listeners a little bit more about African self writing and Afrofuturism, which were two of the concepts that emerged in that chapter and which I like particularly as concepts, the latter of which captures quite a long tradition of African speculative fiction. Right. So how did you work with that history and why read climate fiction?
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C
Great, thanks very much. Yeah, in some ways this is the kind of central question that I kept on coming back to and wrestling with whilst writing the book. And yeah, it's a good question. Why read Climate fiction, especially when fiction films, popular culture, is so often seen as a diversion or as a form of escapism. So my argument in the book is that fiction can be powerful and it can be really important for radical politics. Now, one argument that we hear a lot, a reason for reading climate fiction often seems to come from the scientists or policymakers is that artists and storytellers are needed to help communicate, communicate the science of climate change to wider public audiences. And this is quite an instrumental view of the role of climate fiction. I think it rests on an assumption that the transition, the net zero transition, is struggling because people, publics don't understand or care enough about the science. And there might be a case for a kind of propagandic role of art in this moment. But I have a number of issues with this argument. Firstly, I don't think this is the reason why net zero transition is struggling. It's not because publics don't understand or care enough about it. Secondly, this is a really interesting area. It's something I haven't done really in this book itself, but there is an interesting literature on what the effect of reading climate fiction is on readers. And the evidence there is mixed at best. We can't just assume that reading more climate fiction turns people into better environmental consumers or activists or policymakers. And thirdly, I think this instrumental argument misses out on what are some of the more, dare I say, profound or important roles that reading fiction can play. So what politically does reading fiction do and what might reading climate fiction do? There are lots of things. One of the classic arguments is that reading fiction encourages empathy. This is kind of the classic role of, if you like, the 19th century novel which asks us to step into someone else's shoes and see experience what the world is like from someone occupying a different class, gender, racial, sexuality, position to our own. And it's really important in the context of the climate crisis, where a transition, the climate crisis will be experienced intersectionally in different ways by different people in different perspectives. Reading fiction also has an important role, I think, in public culture and a democracy, a plural public sphere where there are multiple stories that are being told, listened to, discussed, debated. I think is really important for both the means and ends of any climate transition stories of how we teach young people about cultural values. They're often how we discuss or debate taboo topics. So stories and reading and debating stories plays a really important role in a democratic public culture. At the heart though, of what I'm trying to do in the book is think about the role stories have for Critical theory and critical theorizing. And this is quite a familiar argument within critical theory where there's been lots of interest in speculative science fiction and so on about how art can hold up a. A mirror to society. Reading and reflecting on the stories can be a form of diagnosis which helps us to reevaluate who we are and how we got here. And widely held assumptions and common sense beliefs and even stories set in fantastical or far futures can act as a mirror on the environment in which we live at the moment. They can be a defamiliarizing or moment of estrangement when we look around us and see, well, maybe things don't have to be the way they are. They can make the familiar strange and bring the unfamiliar into clearer focus. And this is why utopian fiction or speculative fiction has been so important in traditions like Marxism and feminism and queer studies. And all of this is absolutely not to be misunderstood as saying all we need to do in the context of the climate crisis is read and write more good stories about it. Or the all. All climate fiction is necessarily politically desirable or helpful. As we started off here, I think cultural texts, stories can reinforce inequitable power relations. They can hide truths and mystify as well as be fertile resources for critique and so on. So I think it's about asking questions about what sorts of climate fiction might imaginatively enhance efforts for a just transition. That's what I'm trying to do in the book.
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B
Yeah. If anything, it reminds me that they're often a good mirror also of what you don't want, which can also help sharpen your own position in reference to them.
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C
Absolutely. And I think this leads us into your question about African self writing and Afrofuturism as well. And that concept of African self writing comes from the work of Achill Mbembe, philosopher, a professor in South Africa, one of the most well known African postcolonial theorists. And he argues that stories can function as this moment of self reflection, self critique, and that discursive forms of storytelling, of self styling, of countercultural resistance are, are in some ways almost quintessentially African modes of decolonial struggle in the context of conflict and migration and highly uneven and hierarchical global power relations. And he draws on Frantz Fanon to call for a resurgence of epic stories which will help imagine new ways of being in the world. And so Mbembe is quite interested in traditions of Afrofuturism which is have been around for a long time. As you suggested, they're usually defined as future oriented forms of art and speculation. Also music, jazz music, fashion, poetry, architecture and so on. In my book, I draw on Nigerian American author Nnedi Okorafor, who prefers the term African futurism to describe modes of speculative fiction that are more rooted in African context, places, storylines and characters, rather than being drawn towards the African American experience. And someone like Cora Faud does invoke and build upon the very long legacy of other African authors writing in traditions of speculative fiction. So Ngugi Wattongo, Ben Okry Zaksimdar, Amos.
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B
Tortola and people that this great fascinating and also reminds me that I was recently working together with colleagues and particularly climate scientists on sort of unprecedented events and weather events. And in this context, kind of storylines have actually emerged as ways of thinking about future unprecedented events, in part because very often conservative modeling practices cannot foreshadow unprecedented events, and it kind of links those processes together. But in the same way, that kind of scientific imaginary is also heavily dominated by the global north and not, for example, by African scientists, which makes this a very unequal relationship in terms of presenting certain ideas of what constitutes unprecedented even and what makes an unprecedented event. Going a bit more into detail in your next chapter, Strange Places and Unfamiliar Homesteads, which is a great chapter title, by the way, I really liked it, takes a super spatial approach and one that's in many ways about distance and closeness or transporting us elsewhere. And that mirrored, imparts this not obsession, but characterization in the global north of climate as something distant temporally and spatially. So kind of form of displacement, if you wish, and I would argue not unlike offshoring emissions, but that's separate. What did you find the role of spatiality and by extension actually temporality to be in the works that you worked on was this kind of two focal points or prisms through which authors did understand futures or characterize them and how do they work with those concepts?
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C
Thanks. Yeah. So in the second half of the book, I discuss some of the themes that I drew out of these stories. In terms of places, in terms of temporality, in terms of ecologies, and then in terms of climate politics and in terms of spatiality and temporality. There's lots of really interesting dynamics going on here and I think, yeah, you're right, that often climate change is rendered distant or move to the margins of thought and visions of the future. In contrast with my experience of reading, let's call it mainstream climate fiction, I think here the move is often to try to render familiar places strange. So the kind of classic examples that many of us think about in Terms of climate fiction, the east coast of the United States is rendered barren and lifeless in Cormac McCarthy's book the Road, or even, I mean even in forms of non fiction or fictionalized parts of nonfiction. So in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring opens with A Fable for Tomorrow in which the east coast, the bucolic villages and farms of East Coast US are rendered silent and barren and lifeless, or even Hollywood, the kind of Hollywood spectacle. So downtown Manhattan is frozen and flooded in the Day After Tomorrow. I think there's something interestingly different going on in some of the African futurist climate fiction. And here there are lots of places that might be assumed to be much more disorienting and dangerous and are seen as such by the characters and hence by the readers of these stories. So deserts are a good example. Lots of these stories are set in the desert. In Nnedi Okorafor's novel who Fears Death, the North African desert is filled with strange storms and magical nomads, but it becomes experienced as a place of beauty and even sanctuary for the central characters. Another example, Sue Davis Ockenbauer's short story Dune Song, portrays that the desert is a place of danger and death, but it's also a space of. Of freedom, emancipation and imagination, actually. So rather than in some classic climate fiction where we see the familiar homely spaces of America being made strange, here we have some apparently inhospitable places like deserts being rendered somehow familiar and homely. And in the book I try to explore these deserts and also other spaces like marshes or forests, forests and museums, as well as spaces of what Michel Foucault called heterotopia. So other spaces or counter sites that disrupt and test who we think we are and how we understand ourselves. And there's something similar but related going on in the chapter on temporality as well, which explores again, ways in which this body of stories, which I should say I don't claim to be representative of African climate fiction more generally, I'm using it in the book as a theoretical resource for the sort of interventions and arguments I want to make that challenge some of the assumptions in both global climate politics and also in mainstream climate fiction as well. And so one of the story, a predominant storyline in a lot of these texts is about Afrocentric futures, in which rather than Africa being, as is often classically rendered in, let's call it Western liberal thought, as associated with backwardness or timelessness or the past, these stories position global futures in which Africa is at the center. So perhaps one of the most famous Examples of the text that I look at is the film Black Panther, in which Wakanda is a kind of symbol of high modernist, cutting edge futurism. The stories are also a lot of them complicate any kind of linear temporality. So you have folded or spiraling forms of time rather than linear time. You have traces and detritus from the past coming back into shape the present and the future. And you have the omnipresence of death and decay that still somehow underpins a kind of utopian revolutionary politics as well. And I think some of these themes come through really interestingly in the Mara and Dan's stories by Doris Lessing, Nobel Laureate, which really explores how societies make sense of the past and the way in which the future can reshape the past. And traces and echoes of the past continue to reshape and challenge visions of climate futures.
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B
Great. Reminded me, or iditritus, at least in part, also of Butler's idea of the rubbish heat of animated debris that then plays a constitutive role in political life and also in present day political life. And this might be a stretch, but it's also very close to your argument. But in a way, the moment you start tackling temporality, you also interrupt, helpfully the kind of linearity that's often imposed via transition logics, which very often, of course then refer back also to colonial history of the idea of development in quotation marks. Did you find that as a sort of interruption, an important element of that temporality? And how does that relate to agency that different actors want to foreground versus leaving the background around?
- [43:30]
C
Absolutely, yeah. I think a really key aspect of environmental modernization, ecological modernization narratives is about the linearity of transition, the image of modernity or modernization as this kind of juggernaut or locomotive, in which decoupling is this key, interestingly, locomotive related metaphor as well, in which the idea we're supposed to divorce economic progress or economic growth and social and technological progress from pollution or increasing consumption of natural resources or emission of greenhouse gases. So we need to cut off and leave behind aspects of our past. In contrast, a lot of these stories are either showing the impossibility of this or thinking about the ways in which the detritus of the past past reshapes the present and future and continues to condition forms of subjectivity and agency. So these stories are full of relics and rubbish from the past, either in museums, which really do crop up quite a lot in these stories, or just lying around in the landscape, the waste of previous civilizations. I've already talked about Nnedi Okorafor's novel who fears death. The desert is full of caves, full full of decrepit computers. And a really interesting kind of exploration of contemporary waste culture and what this might mean to future civilizations as well. I think it came through most strikingly for me in Doris Lessing's Mara and Dan stories, where it's not just that there is the very material relics of the past as well, solar panels, tunics, these sorts of things. But she also really encourages us to think about other ways of the detritus of the past that maybe modernization narratives assume will be left behind. So racism and misogyny and social violence and so on. And a lot of people have written about the sense of nostalgia you get in these stories by Doris Lessing. And there's a kind of nostalgia about the loss of. Of these technology, a loss of understanding about these technologies for the past. But there's also anger about how these amazing scientific achievements of past civilizations were deployed mainly for war and violence and exploitation of the environment, extraction of resources and so on. And so there are two implications I take from this. One is that when we're thinking about. About the governance and politics of transition, we also need to address questions of how we might memorialize and make sense of our past. And museums can play a really interesting and important role in helping societies grapple with these questions and grapple with transition narratives more generally. There's a wonderful example from Sweden, the Museum of Carbon Ruins exhibition, which envisions what a Museum in 2053 will preserve and memorialize and say about our contemporary culture. And the second implication of this is that these African futurist stories, they do offer this more complex and contradictory temporality. These are revolutionary and utopian stories in which the world is turned upside down and everything has changed, but in which there are. There are traces and detritus from the past that continue to play a role. Violence, racism, inequality continues to play a role even in these utopian, revolutionary contexts of the future. And I think this is a really distinctive contribution of black and queer theory to utopian studies. The continuing role of death and violence, necropolitics, if you like, even within utopian speculations about the future. And so here I was thinking. I was trying to think with or draw on Donna Haraway here in the sense of kind of staying with the trouble, even in thinking about speculative futures. And her interest in communities of compost in which decay and death and composting are central to lively and livable and convivial futures as well.
- [48:20]
B
I like that A lot, in part because it also then distinguishes utopia from fantasy, right? And on the one hand, illusion versus imaginary in many other ways. In your chapter on reparations and reparative and revolutionary approaches, you ask what does victory look like? And I was wondering if you found an answer. I'm also asking that because increasingly reparations are often being used as a moment or a means to achieve certain justice outcomes without, however, this idea of just really being investigated or understood or maybe opened up to democratic discussion and transparency in terms of future justice claims. So what does victory look like? And what was the answer of the different authors you examined?
- [49:15]
C
Yeah, that would be nice, wouldn't it? If not just a vision of victory, but a roadmap of how to get there. There's all sorts of interesting things to draw out from these stories in this regard, as we were just saying that these are revolutionary utopian visions in many ways. So Nnedi Okorafor's story Noor talks about a wind and solar powered future civilization which is in some senses thrown off neocolonial inequalities, but in which state violence, corporate violence and authoritarian political cultures have continued to exist. And then there's, without too many spoilers, there's a kind of revolutionary insurgents. And at the end of the book, the power is turned off, the wind turbines are ceased. And this is very much in the narrative of the story. This is a victory in that book. It doesn't explore what comes next, but I think other stories do, and I think it's a really, really important question. And of course there's lots of different visions across these different, different stories and authors, some of them, I think, the ones that I was maybe most drawn to, there are attempts to portray the kind of ecosocialist communities more egalitarian, living in balance, or at least a more sustainable relationship with their environments. So Chinello Onuolo, for example, has some beautiful short stories set in a far future Nigeria after climate change or after climate fueled wars, in which communities have managed to build sometimes small scale, sometimes larger scale communities that promote healing and balance and processing the traumas of the past. Interestingly, that's where the narrative tension in these kind of utopian visions comes from, is in terms of how societies manage and deal with the re emergence of the traumas and violence of the past. And in a way, rather than offering a kind of the floor plan of a future utopian society, I think it's the critical estranging function of this kind of literature that leads us to ask how could things be different in our own worlds. And why are things the way they are? One of the really important political functions of literature. So it's the way in which a fictional story is an antidote to the sense in which there is no alternative, that the kind of balance has been lost. And for activists and policymakers in the moment, that kind of reassurance or antidote to the depressing reality of contemporary politics is sometimes really necessary. And it doesn't have to be escapist. It can be reflective and insightful and strategic and critical as well. And you get this in lots of other, obviously in lots of other stories and authors as well. So someone who's not an African author, but Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the most more famous authors of climate fiction at the moment. And so Ministry for the Future is an attempt to map a pathway or set out a vision to a better society that has somehow dealt with or, or transition to forms of a post fossil fuel civilization. You get it in some of Ursula Le Guin stories as well. You get glimpses of it in Octavia Butler's stories. And Butler described it as the kind of what if storyline, the fertilization of social dreaming, the freedom dreams, emancipatory element of utopian fiction. And I think this is one of the reasons why these stories and this line of research, in a sense, sense resonates so often with activists, but also with students as well. And it seems to work really well in teaching that thinking about these kind of stories can function as a kind of antidote to how depressing so much of environmental politics, contemporary environmental politics, is. But it's also, as you suggest, in the ways in which, even if you're not reading specific policy implications off from these stories, which is always a kind of risky line to go down, but the way in which these kind of stories that think about what it might mean to heal the wounds of the past, to build new societies, to repair some of the damages that have been wrought by and between humans, but also on non humans. Those can feed into discussions that we're having even within UNFCCC processes around reparations, around loss and damage, and perhaps broader conversations that don't frame this so much in terms of simple monetary exchanges, but what it might take more broadly for societies to heal and repair some of the damages and violences of the past.
- [54:36]
B
That's great. And also in many ways sharpening our diagnostic tools. I think for many analyses we're kind of excluding a significant number of, of at least climatic concerns to help sustain the parsimony of the argument, but outside of the reality as it unfolds. I also felt that reading Butler, the thing that was really important for me is that this ever present questioning of inevitability, which I thought was really, really important to highlight that none of these inequalities are inevitable outcomes of today. There is no path dependency in that that way. But there are moments at which actors have made conscious decisions to produce an inequality or further it and so forth. We are sadly running out of time. But I have one unfair question to ask you and then a last one which I hope is less unfair. The first is did you have a secret favorite story or one that most surprised you and what are you working on on next?
- [55:44]
C
Well, thank you. I think. Yeah, that's a really tough question. It's sort of like asking me to choose my favorite child.
- [55:52]
B
You don't have to answer it.
- [55:57]
C
It's a tricky one. And there's a funny thing actually about spending so long reading and writing and thinking about about these stories, reading them as fuel for political theorizing. There is a risk in doing this in that it can kind of cut you off from reading as just a source of pleasure and enjoyment. And I find it in some ways quite hard to remember what it was like to read these stories for the first time or return to them just as something you might read for pleasure. I've gained so much from studying these stories and I think, I mean in terms of the two authors that have had the biggest impact and that would have the will stay with me for the longest would be Nnedi Okorafor and Doris Lessing. So Okorafor's story, a novel who fears death, is still, I think, one of the most powerful, shocking, awful, but ultimately inspiring stories I've come across. It would probably be the one that I would recommend to someone who was interested in getting into African futurist climate fiction. I mean I did really grow to love Doris Lessing's work and particularly the Mara and Dan's stories whilst doing this research in a way that probably surprised me with both Lessing and Akoropha as well. I think it was also bitter being exposed to this new world of or at least different academic body of literature, of criticism and engagement with their work that I found absolutely enthralling as well in terms of what comes next. There's one thing I'd love to do, which I was obviously interested in during this research, but I didn't do at all during this book. There's a sizable literature on reception studies, so how people read and make sense of of these stories, what reading climate fiction does to people and their behaviors and beliefs and attitudes and so on. And so I'd love to, in a way, I'd love to carry on discussing these stories with activists and students and policymakers in book clubs or in featuring workshops and things like that, and have the opportunity to continue this project in that way. More immediately, though, I'm continuing to try to think through some of the theoretical issues and debates that this project has raised for me. For example, we talked a bit about it today, the role of literature in critical theory as a form of defamiliarization and the defamiliarizing move, which is often argued to be a core move of critical theory, but in the contemporary context, I mean, you also see lots of right wing populists and climate skeptics and conspiracy theorists theorists employing this similar kind of defamiliarizing move. So at the moment I'm trying to work on a paper which is about that age old question of what the role of critical theory might be at a time in which the world is on fire all around us.
- [59:20]
B
Great. Thank you so so much for speaking with us, Carl. Carl's book is now published with Oxford University Press. I'm wishing you a lovely day. You've been listening to the New Books Network. Until next time Time.
- [59:46]
E
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C
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