ABSTRACT
Responding to a ‘hyperobject’ (Morton) such as climate change is a complicated business. Given its implication for every aspect of human and non-human life on the planet, the reality of climate change is absolutely multiple (Mol). For this reason, the challenge of teaching climate change is the challenge of multiplicity: just as politicians, policy makers or global citizens of differing historical contexts struggle to apprehend, arrest and make provisions for the manifestations of climate change in a bewildering array of forms, so too do the designers, makers and narrators of our co-constituted technical and poetic worlds. In a literary studies context, the role of storytelling becomes a focus in this field of multiplicity, and with this, particular questions around the constitution and the success of climate change literature – what makes a ‘good’ climate change story? This chapter will argue that, while this question is clearly open to debate, it is
most productively posed in specific socio-historic contexts. Just as there is no single reality of climate change, there can be no totalizing story that accounts for it. Moreover the lived specificities of climate change are not just experientially contingent, they are also entangled with complex subject positions emergent from diverse historical legacies. Teaching climate change through literary studies must inevitably work with this recognition. No one text will ‘represent’ climate change, or its experience, but the possibilities for teaching climate change literature lie in more than offering a range of experiences in a range of texts. Rather, these possibilities are immanent to the provocations offered by literature that writes from within specific historical legacies and pushes at, and beyond, the limits of these histories in the face of climate change. In the Australian situation from which I write, these legacies are postcolonial in
a particular context of settler-colonialism. From here, the question of writing climate change must inevitably confront the implication of this history in the very conditions that have generated climate change and its impacts. A ‘good’ climate change story in these terms – a descriptor that will be explored further in this chapter – will be one that challenges the logic and sovereignty of Western
modernity and its subjects in a postcolonial assertion of alternative historical and ontological realities. In a sense, the question in this context reorients from one concerned with story’s sustaining capacities to the ongoing sustainability of certain narratives and narrative forms in a postcolonial time of climate change. This chapter will focus on Alexis Wright’s 2011 novel The Swan Book in
response to this reorientation, a text by an Indigenous Australian woman that explicitly connects a climate-changed future to a colonial past within the worldaltering parameters of Indigenous reality.
