The American Climate Emergency Narrative

The American Climate Emergency Narrative reveals reveals how much of what has been called "climate fiction" casts ecological breakdown as an emergency for American capitalist modernity rather than for the planet. The book traces the origins of this narrative back to the arrival of settler capitalism in America, when the understanding of the planet and its people as extractable resources was established. Since then, this narrative has elided the violent history of the climate crisis while at the same time leveraging the military as a bulwark against the crises capitalism has caused, the people it has uprooted, even the ailing planet itself.

This is an open access book.

“In the flood of climate-related books, Johan Höglund has given us something distinctive: an insightful account of how American hegemony has produced not only climate crisis but a self-serving emergency narrative. Gracefully and clearly written, The American Climate Emergency Narrative illuminates the entangled relations of cultural power, capitalist rapacity, and the American war machine in the making of climate crisis. Höglund allows us to see the distinctively American – and ideological – flavor of today’s climate emergency rhetoric, and in so doing, to make sense of the planetary turbulence, and transitions, of the next few decades.” (Jason W. Moore, Binghamton University, USA, author of “Capitalism in the Web of Life”)

“Johan Höglund's indispensable study of the ‘climate emergency’ narrative contextualizes the literature within a deeply disquieting interpretation of American capitalist modernity, security cultures and neocolonialism. Moving from plantation cultures to contemporary fiction of the 'new weird' and the post-apocalyptic, Höglund links the world-ecological with the world-systemic. By arguing that these narratives worry more about the US nation state than the crisis of interconnected multispecies ecologies of the planet, Höglund proposes a new framework and conceptual vocabulary for Climate Fiction, and a corrective to conventional ecocritical readings.” (Pramod K. Nayar, University of Hyderabad, India, author of “Ecoprecarity” and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies)

“While activists, scholars, and scientists call for new climate narratives that help us imagine alternative pathways toward the just, fair, and ecologically sane world global majorities desire, Höglund shows that American climate emergency narratives propose that no such alternatives are possible. At the same time, they unconsciously reveal the violent anti-democratic and anti-ecological core of the capitalist world system. A system that treats people and the rest of the planet as disposable, survives against the interests and will of the majority only with the backing of the most expensive policing and military apparatus in world history, and the most morally bankrupt cultural apparatus. Dismantling such a system is crucial to our collective survival, and Höglund’s work points us toward fiction emerging from the periphery that opens up such necessary possibility.” (Hannah Holleman, Amherst College, USA, author of “Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism”)

“A stunning, original and compelling reading of American cultural work from the plantation to the present, that fully realises the long roots of capitalism’s climate emergency. Höglund takes a world-ecological lens to an innovative and impressive range of texts and genres and in so doing repurposes our understanding of the climate narrative and climate criticism. Through recurrences of war, conquest and militarization, extractivism, and migrancy, The American Climate Emergency Narrative is brilliantly discerned throughout literature, film, and video games, where capitalism’s climate produces multiple monsters.” (Graeme Macdonald, University of Warwick, UK, author, with the Warwick Research Collective, of “Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-literature”)
 

Johan Höglund is Professor of English and a member and former director of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He is the author of The American Imperial Gothic and editor of several collections and special issues that investigate how popular culture narrates colonialism, neocolonialism, and extractive capitalism.