‘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 climate change 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 Anthropocene 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 environmental humanities 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, solarpunk, 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