The “Anthropocene” in Popular Culture: Narrating Human Agency, Force, and Our Place on Earth

Africanfuturist Socio‐Climatic Imaginaries and Nnedi Okorafor’s Wild Necropolitics

“…These developments have led to a burgeoning of research in cultural studies and literary theory (Chakrabarty 2012;Gergan et al 2020;Ghosh 2016;Streeby 2018;Trexler 2015;Whyte 2018;Yusoff and Gabrys 2011); however, more politically focused-research has tended to remain dominated by the initial canon of realist texts (e.g. Harris 2017;Milkoreit 2016Milkoreit , 2017Nikoleris et al 2019). Much scholarly effort has been expended on showing how cli-fi imaginaries match or reflect dominant policy scenarios.…”

“…Okorafor's work is particularly significant in terms of the production and contestation of climate imaginaries because of the prominence of themes of power, violence, race, gender, colonialism, and ecology. Who Fears Death is not obviously climate fiction in the same way as, for example, Ian McEwan's Solar or Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital trilogy (Nikoleris et al 2019), but by taking a broader view of climate fiction as going beyond work which focuses on the relationship between climate scientists and policymakers, it is clear that the politics of necropolitical carboniferous capitalism provide both a crucial context for Okorafor's novels as well as prominent themes which shape the narrative (Jue 2017;Pahl 2018). My argument here is that we can read Okorafor's Who Fears Death as an articulation of new ways of being and becoming human in the context of the "wild necropolitics" of climatic apocalypse.…”

“…An imaginary is a form of world-creation, the construction of a world-view encompassing narratives, characters, places, practices and technologies. Whilst many sink without trace, the most powerful and influential can restructure dominant ways of narrating the world in the present (Adams et al 2012;Hammond 2021;Milkoreit 2016Milkoreit , 2017Nikoleris et al 2019;Yusoff and Gabrys 2011). In the context of contemporary politics-and particularly raced and gendered forms of climate violence-it is crucial to understand how dominant and insurgent imaginaries struggle for influence.…”

A leap of Green faith: the religious discourse of Socio-Ecological Care as an Earth system governmentality

“…In seeking answers to these questions, recent work has shown that a range of knowledges are involved in the reconceptualisation of environmental governance in the Anthropocene (Lövbrand et al, 2020;Nikoleris et al, 2019). One type of knowledge which has been highlighted as having played a key role in reshaping understanding of the relationship between humanity and the non-human world is Earth System Science (ESS) (Lövbrand et al, 2009;Uhrqvist & Lövbrand, 2014).…”

Language, knowledge, power: The Discursive Construction of Climate Engineering Governance

“…In seeking answers to these questions, recent work has shown that a range of knowledges are involved in the reconceptualization of environmental governance in the Anthropocene (Nikoleris et al, 2019, Lövbrand et al, 2020. One type of knowledge which has been highlighted as having played a key role in reshaping understanding of the relationship between humanity and the non-human world is Earth System Science (ESS) (Lövbrand et al, 2009b, Uhrqvist and.…”