We are the world (but only at the end of the world): Race, disaster, and the Anthropocene

Abstract

This essay explores the racial politics of a select group of contemporary disaster film and fiction to reveal the relationship between race and futurity that also undergirds discussions of the Anthropocene. I provide a comparative close reading of the disasters in Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, Behn Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. I argue that the cultural anxieties that structure these texts are expressions of the racial logic rooted in universalist concerns for the future of humanity, the very concern of the Anthropocene. Arguing against inclusion as the means of achieving equality and toward a new materialist understanding of race, my paper illuminates not only the racial assumptions of the Anthropocene but also, and perhaps more importantly, its racial consequences.

For a new weird geography

“…In this sense, the epoch most relevant for the New Weird may be the Plantationocene (Haraway, 2015), which centres colonialism, capitalism and enduring racial hierarchies. Fictive forms used to represent the Anthropocene often rely on harmful racial stereotypes whilst downplaying the effects of environmental catastrophe that are disproportionately experienced according to racist social hierarchies (Joo, 2020). Mabel Gergan and colleagues (2020; 93) have demonstrated how Anthropocene anxiety in film ‘uncomfortably reiterates a nature/human binary figured in racialised terms, at times serving as a proxy for deep-seated anxieties of racialised Others “taking over” the planet’.…”

Decolonising Flooding and Risk Management: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism, and Memories of Environmental Injustices

“…Disasters are pivotal moments when collective memories, narratives, values, histories, and futurities are observed and experienced because they propel the query of conformability with specific socio-cultural norms, worldviews, and power structures [19][20][21][22]. The framing of flooding as a disaster event and responses to it confers an opportunity for a settler colonial society and powerful interest groups within it to delineate and reassert its boundaries of social, economic, and cultural formations (which privilege the values and modes of living of settlers).…”

The Water Myth in Cinema

“…The studies on The Day After Tomorrow analyze how the thesis that global warming causes climate disaster was created in the film (Leiserowitz, 2004;Von Burg, 2012). Studies on 2012, an apocalyptic movie, are again concentrated on global warming, climate threat (Methmann & Rothe, 2012), class discrimination and white human supremacy (Joo, 2020). The Noah movie is one of these movies on which much work has been done.…”