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Notes
1 Susan Palwick and Octavia Butler, “Imagining a Sustainable Way of Life An Interview with Octavia Butler,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 6, no. 2 (1999): 150.
2 Stephanie LeMenager, “Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre,” in Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, ed. Tobias Menely and Jesse O. Taylor (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 223.
3 Palwick and Butler, “Imagining a Sustainable Way of Life,” 150.
4 “Cli-fi” is a term, short for climate fiction, coined by climate activist Dan Bloom in the late 2000s.
5 “In 2000, atmospheric chemist and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen teamed up with biologist Eugene Stoermer to suggest that humanity’s impact on the earth’s atmosphere was significant enough to constitute a new geological epoch, the ‘anthropocene’”: P. Howe Joshua, Making Climate Change History: Documents From Global Warming’s Past, Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 282.
6 Erik Swyngedouw, “Apocalypse Forever?” Theory, Culture & Society 27, nos 2-3 (2010): 216.
7 Ibid., 219.
8 Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts (New York: Akashic Books, 2017).
9 In Butler’s novels, “The Pox,” short for apocalypse, describes the time between 2015 and 2030 during which the worst of the climate changes takes place: Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1998), 8.
10 Overrepresented as humanity in toto, this figure “is usually associated with the Enlightenment subject, C. B. MacPherson’s possessive individual, and/or ‘Man’ as glossed in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: he is rational, bounded, integral, sovereign, and self-aware. This is the figure to whom rights and citizenship are granted”: Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2 (2015): 190.
11 Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015–17), Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti (2015), and alexis pauline gumbs’s M Archive (2018), among others.
12 Ruth E. McKie, The Climate Change Counter Movement: How the Fossil Fuel Industry Sought to Delay Climate Action (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2023).
13 Palwick and Butler, “Imagining a Sustainable Way of Life,” 150.
14 Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 218.
15 Ibid., 1.
16 Ibid., 277.
17 Ibid., 276.
18 Ibid., 189.
19 Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
20 Macerena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), xvi.
21 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 301.
22 Ibid., 286.
23 Ibid., 309.
24 C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 233.
25 OEB 3245, commonplace book (large) qtd. in Shelley Streeby, Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 71.
26 Popularized by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action the “matriarchal thesis” claims that Black families follow a matriarchal pattern that handicaps Black men because it is so out of joint with broader American society. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965).
27 Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Hachette Books, 1993), 12.
28 When she meets her future husband Bankole, Lauren relates that they bonded of the Black power origins of their last names: “We’re both descended from men who assumed African surnames back during the 1960s”: ibid., 230.
29 Locke, Two Treatises, 292.
30 Butler, Sower, 12.
31 Ibid., 107.
32 Butler, Talents, 13.
33 Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), 24.
34 Ibid., 25.
35 Locke, Two Treatises, 287-88.
36 Butler, Sower, 11.
37 Black disability scholar Sami Schalk’s paraphrases Margaret Price’s term bodymind as “the enmeshment of the mind and body, which are typically understood as interacting and connecting, yet distinct entities.” Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, And Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 5.
38 Butler, Sower, 37.
39 Ibid., 202.
40 Ibid., 79.
41 Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 275.
42 Gore, Earth in the Balance, 1.
43 Butler, Talents, 380.
44 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Sense of Things,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2, no. 2 (2016): 15.
45 Axelle Karera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,” Critical Philosophy of Race 7, no. 1 (2019): 32, 47.
46 In Shock Doctrine, Klein argues that under neoliberal capitalism “disaster” is exploited as a shock tactic to establish controversial and/or unpopular policies: Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 1st edn (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007).
47 Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone, 4.
48 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 221.
49 Claire Colebrook, “We Have Always Been Post-Anthropocene: The Anthropocene Counterfactual,” in Anthropocene Feminism, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 3.
50 Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone, xvi.
51 Joanna Zylinska, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 28.
52 Colebrook, “We Have Always Been Post-Anthropocene,” 3.
53 Zylinska, The End of Man, 29.
54 Bould Mark, “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF,” Science Fiction Studies 34, no. 2 (2007): 177.
55 Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts, 28.
56 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 35.
57 Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts, 285.
58 Crutzen and Stoermer qtd in Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 211.
59 Ibid., 220.
60 Ibid., 211.
61 Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts, 23.
62 Zylinska, The End of Man, 20.
63 Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts, 46.
64 Ibid., 50.
65 Ibid., 344.
66 Ibid.
67 In Parable of The Talents, figurehead for “Christian America” and US presidential candidate/President Andrew Steele Jarret campaigns on the slogan “Make America Great Again”: Butler, Talents, 20.
68 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65.
69 Ibid., 80.
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Megan Finch
Megan Finch is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her works has or will appear in MELUS, Cultural Critique, South, and differences. Her research focuses on Black women novelists of the post-Civil Rights era and their engagement with Enlightenment/enslavement-era discourses of unreason.