Ann Imke

Eco-Narrating Contradictions: Postcolonial Perspectives in Climate Fiction

As climate change unfolds across the planet, it entangles dimensions such as the biological, material, atmospheric, economic, political, social, and cultural. However, our comprehension of this vastness and complexity is filtered through human perspectives, which are limited by the spaces, time scales and bodies we inhabit. Scholars such as Lawrence Buell and Amitav Ghosh have therefore described climate change as a “crisis of the imagination,” in which humans are left to navigate the gap between incomprehensible reality and our climate change imaginaries (collective ways of framing, interpreting, and believing in climate realities).

Literary fiction, with its capacity to prompt reader simulation of otherwise inaccessible spaces and perspectives, is uniquely positioned to stage encounters between divergent and contradictory climate imaginaries. My dissertation investigates speculative climate fiction as a discursive site for negotiating climate imaginaries. Focusing on the imagined futures of climate-altered coastal communities, I investigate how narrative form and spatial representation mediate between dominant imaginaries—such as apocalyptic or techno-futurist scenarios—and imaginaries grounded in alternative, subaltern, and more-than-human perspectives.

Drawing on postcolonial theory, posthumanism, econarratology, and spatial theories from both literary and human geography studies, the project analyzes works from both Global North and South contexts to reveal tensions, negotiations, and hybridities emerging from competing environmental imaginaries. By reading these climate fiction works through the lens of contradiction, the project situates climate fiction as a key cultural arena for contesting conflicting climate knowledge.