‘What’s in a Name?’: Cli-Fi and American Studies (Extended Forum)

Ed. Susanne Leikam and Julia Leyda

Cli-Fi and American Studies: An Introduction1

Susanne Leikam and Julia Leyda

Over the course of the last three decades, the field of American Studies—and we should be even more precise and refer to the New American Studies here—has aptly demonstrated that it is not about labeling and categorizing. On the con- trary, our discipline has a long history of interrogating practices of naming. Hon- oring this tradition, we have borrowed the provocative title of Janice Radway’s 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association that challenged the very designation of our discipline in order to critically question the concep- tual, methodological, and terminological approaches to narratives in American Studies and related disciplines in regard to their inherent assump- tions, ideological underpinnings, and potential benefits as well as shortcomings. This endeavor is pertinent to the present moment since recent years have seen a remarkable burgeoning of a heterogeneous body of cultural texts, including lit- erature, film, visual arts, and performances, and scientific works that take on the challenge of prompting global audiences to engage emotionally and intellectually with the implications of anthropogenic climate change. Narratives of human interference with the weather (and vice versa) and tales of changing climates have a long tradition reaching back to Native American cre- ation stories, Greek mythology, and English Renaissance poetry.2 The present surge of creative output sets itself apart from this large corpus of texts through its foregrounding of the human causation of climate change, its comprehensive en- gagement with the catastrophic results, and—especially and maybe most impor- tantly—the less spectacular, but equally harmful, structural, social, and environ-

1 This extended forum originated in the European Association for American Studies Con- ference 2016 in Constanta, Romania, where we organized a two-hour roundtable that featured ten-minute statements by all participants and a comprehensive discussion. Our main goal was to situate current approaches to contemporary climate change fiction in American Studies. 2 See James Rodger (aka Jim) Fleming’s history of weather and climate control titled Fix- ing the Sky (2010) for examples. The texts he discusses range from Mark Twain’s The American Claimant (1892) to William Wallace Cook’s The Eighth Wonder: Working for Marvels (1907) to the Warner Brothers’ Looney Tune Porky the Rain-Maker (1936) and Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 Cat’s Cradle. See also the introduction to Adam Trexler’s 2015 Fictions. 110 Susanne Leikam and Julia Leyda mental injustices inherent in anthropogenic modifications of the global climate famously termed “slow violence” by Rob Nixon in 2011 (see also Solnit’s “Call Climate Change What It Is: Violence”). With examples ranging from plays such as Chantal Bilodeau’s Sila, popular Hollywood films like The Day After Tomor- row or Interstellar, and photography projects including James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey to novels such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy (Green Earth), Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, and hybrid science/fiction formats such as climatologist James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren, cli-fi has been particularly productive in North American cultural production, which is why a closer examination from the disciplinary vantage point of American Stud- ies is warranted.3 We choose to employ ‘cli-fi,’ the popular, provocative, and hotly debated linguis- tic portmanteau, as a proxy in order to discuss the disciplinary and didactic use- fulness, the creative potentials, and the conceptual limits of the current scholarly inquiries into climate-conscious works from various interdisciplinary and interme- dial perspectives. The term cli-fi has most visibly and productively been promoted in the Western media by the Taiwan-based activist and blogger Dan Bloom, who claims to have coined the expression as a supposedly novel genre designation for works foregrounding climate change. Hence, cli-fi by now boasts its own mytholo- gized, albeit fervently discussed, origin story: According to Bloom, he first used the term in 2007 in an article about Jim Laughter’s novel Polar City Red (“Thanks to TeleRead and NPR”). The term was later publicized by media outlets such as NPR, which promoted it as “a new literary genre” in 2013 (Evancie). In recent years, Bloom’s fervor for cli-fi has led him to start a variety of proj- ects intending to raise awareness about anthropogenic climate change, such as, among many other examples, a website linking to worldwide cli-fi-related popular culture media coverage, The Cli-Fi Report, a Facebook group currently called “Cli-Fi, Climate Change, and Literary Criticism,” a Twitter presence boosting #clifi, and efforts to establish an annual movie award for cli-fi films (“‘Cliffies Award’”). Like most creations, the term has entirely escaped the control of its alleged creator. Accordingly, we may not hew closely to Bloom’s takes on cli-fi in our discussion of the various conceptual, methodological, and terminological ap- proaches to contemporary climate change fiction. Rather, we aim to use the term as a prism to make visible the sundry trajectories of different understandings of this and related terms used to assess texts foregrounding anthropogenic climate change. This approach also does justice to the heterogeneous uses of the term cli- fi: Initially, cli-fi gained momentum in popular culture, where it was readily adopt- ed due to its catchiness in news and journalism as well as in online reading clubs and on digital book review sites. This development went hand in hand with the commodification of cli-fi as a marketing term, serving companies such as Amazon as a tool to promote books and films dealing with climate change. By now, cli-fi is also on its way to becoming a household name in academia. It can be increas-

3 In her 2016 article “Climate Change in Literature,” Adeline Johns-Putra provides an ex- tensive list of examples of cli-fi works in the field of (mostly) British and North American litera- ture and literary studies. See also the blog Artists and Climate Change; Trexler. ‘What’s in a Name?’: Cli-Fi and American Studies 111 ingly found at recent international conferences such as the annual meetings of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) and the Modern Language Association Conference (MLA) as well as in publications, talks, and university curricula as scholars and educators in many disciplines embrace the recent spate of cultural production dealing with anthropogenic climate change.4 In recent ecocritical scholarship, meanwhile, several provocative neologisms have arisen in tandem, and often overlapping, with cli-fi. Among these new desig- nations in literary criticism are, to name but a few, climate change fiction, petro- fiction, ecofiction, , ecodrama, the risk novel, or Anthropocene fiction. Similarly, in cinema and media studies new directions in research take monikers such as ecocinema, ecomedia, Anthropocenema, crisis cinema, climate trauma cinema, and eco-trauma cinema. Environmental humanities offer further con- ceptions of interdisciplinary critical approaches that frequently address climate change narratives, such as media ecologies, petroculture studies, and energy hu- manities.5 These terms are each entangled within their own specific long-standing cultural and critical traditions, ideological frameworks, affective motives, and socio-political, aesthetic, and economic strategies. As our contributor Hannes Bergthaller points out, Americanists have always known that naming does mat- ter: Indeed, it often frames new approaches and identifies new areas of inquiry. Given the plethora of terminology at our disposal, we might not need the speci- ficities (and ensuing limitations) of the term cli-fi in American Studies, but we do need to reflect on the inherent positions and assumptions the use of these terms implies for research in our field. While not limited to North America, cli-fi emerges closely entangled with American Studies. On the one hand, North America, particularly the United States, is one of the most prolific global exporters of popular culture. On the other hand, with its leading role in historic and contemporary energy consumption and climate emissions, the United States frequently features as a key agent in cli-fi narratives from all around the globe. Besides, cli-fi brings topical trajectories and scholarly inquiries that had for a long time been the sole stomping grounds of the environmental humanities closer to the interdisciplinary lens of American Studies. At the same time, the conceptual, methodological, and theoretical frame- works of American Studies offer extensive expertise for analyses of the hetero- geneous body of cultural texts engaging with anthropogenic climate change. The above-mentioned popular culture origin of cli-fi is but one example of the benefits of an American Studies approach to cli-fi since few disciplines can claim a history longer and an engagement tighter with popular culture studies, its economic and

4 See the panel “What Lies Beneath Cli-Fi Narratives?: Climate Science, Climate Justice, Cli-Fi Aesthetics and EcoPedagogies” at the 2015 ASLE Conference in Moscow, Idaho; the panel “Cli-Fi: Climate Change and Narrative Fiction” at the 2016 MLA conference in Austin, Texas; the April 2016 international conference “Between Fact and Fiction: Climate Change Fic- tion” at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Delmenhorst; and many more. 5 To name only a few representative authors working with these various terms and concepts, see Clark; Cubitt; Huber; Kaplan; Kara; LeMenager; Mayer and Weik von Mossner; Narine; Rust et al.; Sharrett; Yaeger. 112 Susanne Leikam and Julia Leyda ideological entanglements with politics, and the question of what kind of cultural work prolific pop culture phenomena perform (see, e. g., Lansford; Lipsitz). For scholars within American Studies, engaging with cli-fi’s relatively recent and emergent archive immediately offers up pathways to transnational frame- works, understanding ‘America’ not as a fixed space but as a fluid and shifting node in a global network of complex and multidirectional flows. This approach to cli-fi hence also encourages in-depth research of cli-fi narratives from outside North America, especially the Global South, engaging key Americanist concepts such as empire, the subaltern, exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and (slow) violence in the pursuit of investigating how access to and exploitation of emissions-heavy resources as well as the related cultural, economic, and political dynamics have shaped (and were shaped by) global power structures. Transnational American Studies, as Nassim Balestrini elaborates in her contribution on climate change- related theater and performance thematizing the Arctic regions, has developed methodological expertise with comparative models and processual understand- ings that aptly lend themselves to the analysis of the global interlocking of the environment with political and economic flows and the worldwide outpouring of creativity that frequently portrays the crossing of national boundaries. The global reaction by artists, writers, and filmmakers to climate change news and projections in recent years means that books, films, and television series are arriving in multiple countries through innovative as well as traditional funding strategies and gaining international notice. And although the United States con- tinues to play a vital role in the production of popular culture, the contemporary global scope and currency of cli-fi also encourages the blurring of national and cultural boundaries, as does the globalization of media formats with their recent and extensive geographical reach. Indeed, some of the more dystopian cli-fi sce- narios (such as, for example, Karl Taro Greenfeld’s novel The Subprimes, the film Snowpiercer, or the television series Incorporated) posit the breakdown of na- tional governments in a post-apocalyptic world controlled by corporations. Given the convergent media environment of the twenty-first century, it should come as no surprise that cli-fi forges a transmedial path that cuts across old and new media forms. In 2016, Fisher Stevens’s climate change documentary Before the Flood, starring Leonardo di Caprio, brought public attention to anthropogenic climate change through its cast of luminaries (including Barack Obama and Pope Francis), A-list soundtrack, and innovative transmedial release strategy, whereby it premiered at Toronto International Film Festival and then aired on National Geographic’s cable channel, with open-access streaming for a limited time after the release. Particularly when conducting research in the field of (American) film and me- dia studies, the term cli-fi is more intuitively comprehensible as transmedial than ‘’ or ‘climate change fiction,’ which may be deemed more appropri- ate for works that primarily consist of the written word. As a stand-alone term, fiction can of course be opposed to fact and thus indicate anything fictional, but it can also bring confusion as it is frequently used to refer to a particular medium— written literature—rather than moving image media such as film, television, and video. In addition to avoiding the potential narrowing connoted by ‘fiction,’ cli-fi ‘What’s in a Name?’: Cli-Fi and American Studies 113 works because, as Alexa Weik von Mossner astutely points out in her contribu- tion, most people immediately comprehend the implicit reference to ‘sci-fi,’ itself a contested term but clearly connected to science fiction as a transmedia phe- nomenon. Cli-fi thus announces the fact that it isn’t medium-specific: cli-fi (like science fiction) does not connote a single medium but rather a (loose) genre that encompasses printed media such as literature and comics, moving image media including film and television, photo projects, and live performances—to name only the most prolific types. In this way, too, it acknowledges a clear debt to the genre of science fiction; there are significant overlaps between the two, as Paweł Frelik argues in his contribution to this forum. However, we believe that scholars cannot reduce cli-fi to merely a subgenre of science fiction because not all cli-fi can be defined as working within the conventions of science fiction. Some argu- ably falls more within the purview of genres such as the Bildungsroman (see, e. g., Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior), the (such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife), or Young Adult books (as in Georgia Clark’s Parched). Cli-fi increasingly takes its place not only in American Studies research but also in teaching American Studies. The utility of cli-fi in the classroom becomes immediately clear upon surveying Internet search results for keywords such as ‘cli-fi,’ ‘climate change,’ and ‘syllabus.’ Many universities now offer entire courses in various disciplines that examine climate change narratives, and the topic ap- peals to students not only in its novelty (as a new term) but also based on pre- existing interest in relevant media and genres and, not least, concerns for their fu- ture (see, for example, Pérez-Peña). As with most special-topic courses, teaching cli-fi in the American Studies classroom provides an opportunity to familiarize students with a wide range of primary texts (drawn from across many media) as well as introduce them to the associated disciplinary and critical debates (includ- ing those surrounding genre and nomenclature) and relevant theoretical readings, the role of cultural narratives in political and social movements, and audience, fan, and reception studies. Additionally, such classes can foster synergistic inter- actions between humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences as students need to research beyond the primary texts to establish interdisciplinary background knowledge for their work with cli-fi narratives. Teaching cli-fi also lends itself to bringing together related courses so that—provided students (or entire classes) are emplaced in different academic fields and cultural backgrounds—it can foster multidisciplinary and transcultural interaction and promote the internationaliza- tion of the American Studies classroom, which are all key concerns of (teaching) our discipline, as the conference “Usable Pasts, Possible Futures: The German Association for American Studies at Sixty,” held on the occasion of the 60th an- niversary of the GAAS/DGfA in the fall of 2013, has unmistakably made clear (see Hebel, Birkle, and Gassert).6

6 For an extended discussion of one such course collaboration (involving two different MA seminars in the North American Studies program at the Freie Universität Berlin that joined forces for a one-day cli-fi workshop hosted by the John F. Kennedy Institute and supported by the IASS Potsdam), see Leyda et al. 114 Susanne Leikam and Julia Leyda

If defined as texts about (changing) climate(s) and the interlocking of humans and climate, cli-fi takes its place within a long-standing tradition and an extensive historical archive, reverberating with pressing contemporary social and environ- mental issues. Over time the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of cli-fi and similar concepts such as Anthropocenema have changed on the side of the production as well as on the side of the reception. These aesthetic patterns and accompanying cultural ideologies concerning (to name but a few) ‘America,’ class, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, nation, globalization, and the localalso provide a profound in- sight not only into the ‘structures of feeling’ surrounding environmental crises but also into how a culture imagines itself, its value systems, beliefs, and futures via the climate crisis. It is our intent to contribute to this scholarly exploration through the topical and conceptual lens of American Studies with the follow- ing contributions to various conceptual, methodological, and terminological ap- proaches to contemporary cli-fi.

Cli-Fi Drama and Performance

Nassim Balestrini

The world of drama and performance has been inundated with new works that address anthropogenic climate change. Examples are Chantal Bilodeau’s project- ed eight-play series The Arctic Cycle (2014-), Deke Weaver’s solo performance Polar Bear God (2008), and art projects like Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson’s nanoq: flat out and bluesome (2002-2004) or Marina Zurkow’s The Post- er Children (2007).7 The activities of Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA), an initiative started by artists in Canada and the United States to publicize the 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP21), clearly indicate that this thematic con- cern has impacted theater programming and other forms of public performances around the globe.8 I will sketch three areas of potentially fruitful intersections between develop- ing theoretical approaches to cli-fi and currently evolving approaches in Ameri- can Studies. First, dramatic and performative renderings of the Arctic address intersections between national concerns and the impact of climate change on the eight nations that claim land rights there (not including native peoples and First Nations as separate from United States and Canadian sovereignty). This circum- stance invites scrutiny according to theoretical concerns of transnational Ameri- can Studies. Second, American Studies’ efforts to address problems of discursive

7 For a comprehensive list of such plays, see artistsandclimatechange.com. Also see Johns- Putra. On the art projects, see Chaudhuri. 8 Regarding CCTA, see Bilodeau, “Arctic in Context” and “As the Climate Change Threat Grows.”