ABSTRACT

Bringing together scholars from English literature, geography, politics, the arts, environmental humanities and sociology, Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene contributes to the emerging debate between bodies of thought first incepted by scholars such as Mouffe, Whyte, Kaplan, Hunt, Swyngedouw and Malm about how apocalyptic events, narratives and imaginaries interact with societal and individual agency historically and in the current political moment. Exploring their own empirical and philosophical contexts, the authors examine the forms of political acting found in apocalyptic imaginaries and reflect on what this means for contemporary society. By framing their arguments around either pre-apocalyptic, peri-apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic narratives and events, a timeline emerges throughout the volume which shows the different opportunities for political agency the anthropocenic subject can enact at the various stages of apocalyptic moments.

Featuring a number of creative interventions exclusively produced for the work from artists and fiction writers who engage with the themes of apocalypse, decline, catastrophe and disaster, this innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the politics of climate change, the environmental humanities, literary criticism and eco-criticism.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

… these unprecedented times

chapter 2|24 pages

Do not go gentle into that good night

Contested narratives and political subjectivities in the Anthropocene

chapter 3|18 pages

The end of worlding

Indigenous cosmologies in the Anthropocene

chapter 4|17 pages

Apocalypse repeated

The absence of the indigenous subject in George Turner's The Sea and Summer (1987)

chapter 5|16 pages

Apocalyptic literary geographies

The Tempest's ‘brave new world,’ Frankenstein's ‘modern Prometheus’ and Cloud-Atlas' ‘furthest-seein’ eye'

chapter 6|14 pages

A world without bodies

Geotrauma and the work of mourning in Jorie Graham's Fast

chapter 7|19 pages

Meaningful life at the end of times

Ageism and the duty-to-die in Logan's Run

chapter 8|16 pages

The catastrophic drive

chapter 10|16 pages

Urbicide in the Anthropocene

Imagining Miami futures

chapter 11|12 pages

Triggering the apparitions

Spectres of chemical seascapes

chapter 13|22 pages

Variegated environmental apocalypses

Post-politics, the contestatory, and an eco-precariat manifesto for a radical apocalyptics