ABSTRACT
From June 2019 to March 2020, Australia experienced devastating bushfires and chronic smoke pollution, a period dubbed the ‘Black Summer.’ This chapter’s central aim is to demonstrate that climate change is an affective phenomenon that emerges from, and contributes to, more-than-human relations. Drawing on understandings of atmospheres as both climatic and affective, it explores how the bushfire smoke and media representations of the wildfires generated physiological harm, emotional distress and novel political identifications. Attuning to the ways the bushfires infiltrated people’s homes, bodies, psyches and relationships, this chapter illustrates how climate change’s affective transcorporeality enables it to flow through, disrupt and transform human selves and societies. When considered alongside appreciation that the bushfires were generated by climate change which in turn has been fuelled by denial and apathy, the 2019/2020 fires exemplify the book’s conceptualisation of climate as patterns of affect.
