The American Climate Emergency Narrative: Origins, Developments and Imaginary Futures (New Comparisons in World Literature)

The American Climate Emergency Narrative reveals how much of what has been called "climate fiction" casts ecological breakdown as an emergency for American capitalist modernity rather than for the planet. The book traces the origins of this narrative back to the arrival of settler capitalism in America, when the understanding of the planet and its people as extractable resources was established. Since then, this narrative has elided the violent history of the climate crisis while at the same time leveraging the military as a bulwark against the crises capitalism has caused, the people it has uprooted, even the ailing planet itself.

This is an open access book.

Johan Höglund is Professor of English and a member and former director of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He is the author of The American Imperial Gothic and editor of several collections and special issues that investigate how popular culture narrates colonialism, neocolonialism, and extractive capitalism.