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Environmental Activism Through Speculative Fiction

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Environmental Activism Through Speculative Fiction OUT WITH THE “I” AND IN WITH THE “KIN”: ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM THROUGH SPECULATIVE FICTION by Mailyn Abreu Toribio A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL May 2019 Copyright 2019 by Mailyn Abreu Toribio ii OUT WITH THE "I" AND IN WITH THE "KIN": ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM THROUGH SPECULATIVE FICTION by Mailyn Abreu Toribio This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Ian P. MacDonald, Department of English, and has been approved by all members of the supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Ian P. MacDo aid, Ph.D. Thesis Advisor---- ---- Carol McGuirk, Ph.D. Eric L. Berlatsky, Chair, Department of English ,z d;=L Michael J. ~well, Ph.D. Dean, Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters ~.5~ Khaled Sobhan, Ph.D. Interim Dean, Graduate College April 30,2.019 Date 111 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author wishes to express sincere gratitude to her committee members for all of their guidance and support, and special thanks to my advisor Dr. Ian P. MacDonald for his inspiration, patience, and encouragement during the typing of this manuscript. The author also wishes to thank those who were instrumental in her success. Among these are the author’s family, friends, and fellow FAU GTA’s who were always there offering their invaluable advice. This manuscript is also dedicated to her little sister Marcia and late mother Yolanda. iv ABSTRACT Author: Mailyn Abreu Toribio Title: Out with the “I” and in with the “Kin”: Environmental Activism Through Speculative Fiction Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Ian P. MacDonald Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2019 Non-Anglophone voices in literature can lead to a better understanding of the intricate relationships shown by Ashley Dawson tying capitalism, slow violence, and uneven development to climate change. There is skepticism that science fiction (sf) in particular can properly present climate issues in the anthropocentric era that we live in today, but scholars such as Shelley Streeby argue against such perceptions. Science fiction writers that use magical realism, such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Nalo Hopkinson, as ecological sf have already accomplished the task of creating speculative works that fit in perfectly under the umbrella of “serious fictions.” These writers work from a non- Anglophone perspective or from a minority group within a Western society, allowing for different modes of thinking to play a part in these bigger discourses. Writers, educators, and other scholars need to reestablish humanity’s kinship with nature. v OUT WITH THE “I” AND IN WITH THE “KIN”: ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM THROUGH SPECULATIVE FICTION CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2: DAWSON, GHOSH, AND STREEBY: THE NEED FOR KINSHIP ....... 1 CHAPTER 3: WIZARD OF THE CROW AS A NATION’S CRY FOR HELP .............. 12 CHAPTER 4: MIDNIGHT ROBBER AS A WARNING ABOUT OUR FUTURE AND THE POTENTIALITY OF CARIBBEAN MULTIPLICITY .......................... 26 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION ......................................................................................... 36 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................. 50 vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Climate fiction traces the effect on climate that humans have had throughout history and Ashley Dawson’s Extinction: A Radical History, identifies hierarchical societies, capitalism, and uneven development as key factors. Our own era, the Anthropocene is the time in which “the transformative impact of humanity on the Earth’s atmosphere” has become so immense that it marks a new geological epoch (Dawson 19). Dawson also proposes solutions to the effects of the Anthropocene Age, which conceptually I will argue, can be tested out through the use of speculative fictions. The term houses branches of the fantastic imagination such as sf, fantasy, climate fiction (cli- fi), and literary styles such as magical realism, surrealism, satire, and the grotesque. Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson lie under the umbrella of speculative fiction, employing elements from all the subgenres specified, but need to be further identified as ecological science fictions, rather than squarely cli-fi or sf. These novels are not portraying natural climate events as one would in a cli-fi text, but rather they show the mechanisms that exacerbate extreme weather. The value of studying these texts in the context of climate change is best identified in their ability to present the cultural, sociopolitical, and economic elements that have separated the human from nature in the dominant discourse of Western development. Ngugi and Hopkinson are able to have discussions that highlight environmental concerns such as climate change by indicting the ideals that have led to the Anthropocene age, and through 1 that indictment humanity can work to reestablish kinship with the natural world and all living things labeled “other” or non-human within it. Recognizing humanity as part of nature and reclaiming that identity is vital to climate change, economic, and sociopolitical discussion, as Ngugi and Hopkinson’s novels will display. As Amitav Ghosh discusses in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, authors need to be writing works that can show the reality of climate change to an audience that continuously sees these natural weather events as improbable, uncanny, and unusual “because to treat them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling--which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time” (27). I believe that speculative fictions break through realist literary conventions and allow people to look at and past climate change to the “what if” stage. Ngugi and Hopkinson’s works include glimpses at alternate ways of living that require kinship with nature predicated on respect, conservation, and preservation. They are also the perfect places for writers to imagine the future of climate change from a perspective that allows for the writer to look at the situation beyond the human. The dominant narrative that we call “history” revolves around human agency set higher than the non-human, including flora and fauna, as well as communities of peoples who have been dehumanized and consequently exterminated or displaced. Although grounded in science and the arts, this rational way of thinking has led to the exclusion of environmental conservation from the human urge to develop. Works of the imagination that trouble those ideals allowing readers to better understand the connections we share with the world around us. Works of the imagination mitigate this anthropocentric 2 perspective as well as conceiving of alternatives to the developmental model that Dawson indicts. By looking at the scholarship written by Dawson and Ghosh, I am led to the conclusion that higher emphasis on the creation, dissemination, and study of speculative fictions that deal with climate issues, cultural perceptions of nature, and indict our past and current modes of development needs to be a cornerstone of the climate change discussion and mainstream education. Through this inclusion, there is the very important potential of having works that focus on the collective, and having that at the center is key to re-establishing humanity’s kinship to the environment. Such a literature has the potential to incite the cultural and political transformation necessary before we reach a new level of mass extinction and global environmental degradation. There are numerous roadblocks that present themselves as writers utilize speculative fictions to discuss humanity’s hand in natural climate events. This makes it difficult to create an idea of a future beyond the current habits of society and the devastation that those habits bring, although the speculative allows for a means of pushing through. To the detriment of the literary community, theory has continuously excluded sf from what Ghosh calls “the mansion of serious fiction” (66). He suggests that science fiction and other speculative genres are better equipped to endure the test of time, as they are likely to be influential in the mainstream and have longevity: “So the real mystery in relation to the agency of nonhuman lies not in the renewed recognition of it, but rather in how this awareness came to be suppressed in the first place, at least within the modes of thought and expression that have become dominant over the last couple centuries” (Ghosh 65). A divide between the imaginative and the scientific are noted by 3 Ghosh as the answer to this question. By entering the age of modernity, partitioning was employed to deepen: the imaginary gulf between Nature and Culture: the former comes to be relegated exclusively to the sciences and is regarded as being off-limits to the latter… This entails the marking off and suppression of hybrids-- and that, of course, is exactly the story of the branding of science fiction, as a genre separate from the literary mainstream. The line that has been drawn between them exists only for the sake of neatness; because
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