Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Ecologies of Crisis
- 1 Crisis Realism: Writing Economically, Thinking Ecologically
- 2 Global Weirding: Climate Crisis and the Anthropocene Imaginary
- 3 Transscalar Blackness: Race and the Long Anthropocene
- 4 Improbable Metaphor: Jesmyn Ward and the Asymmetries of the Anthropocene
- 5 Unmitigated Blackness: Paul Beatty’s Transscalar Satire
- Works Cited
- Index
3 - Transscalar Blackness: Race and the Long Anthropocene
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Ecologies of Crisis
- 1 Crisis Realism: Writing Economically, Thinking Ecologically
- 2 Global Weirding: Climate Crisis and the Anthropocene Imaginary
- 3 Transscalar Blackness: Race and the Long Anthropocene
- 4 Improbable Metaphor: Jesmyn Ward and the Asymmetries of the Anthropocene
- 5 Unmitigated Blackness: Paul Beatty’s Transscalar Satire
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
History doesn’t unfold with one era bound to and determining the next in an unbroken chain of causality […] So the point isn’t the impossibility of escaping the stranglehold of the past, or that history is a succession of uninterrupted defeats, or that the virulence and tenacity of racism is inexorable. But rather that the perilous conditions of the present establish the link between our age and a previous one in which freedom too was yet to be realized.
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your MotherHow terrifying it has been to realize no one thinks my people have a future. And how gratifying to finally accept myself and begin spinning the futures I want to see.
N.K. Jemisin, How Long ’til Black Future Month?Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.
N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth SeasonHeld under a certain light, N. K. Jemisin’s 2020 science fiction novel, The City We Became, picks up where Nell Zink leaves off. The book starts with, as one of the protagonists describes it, a picture of “Weird New York” in the days immediately leading up to and during a siege of the city by a Lovecraftian entity who is attempting to destroy it (32; emphasis in original). The plot of The City We Became is strange and complex, turning around a central conceit that cities are born into existence through individual surrogates who are made to represent each city. We start as New York is struggling to be born and the city’s surrogate has only narrowly escaped defeat in a fight against a nebulous enemy, the Woman in White and her minions, a set of man-bun-donning provocateurs – the type who love craft beer, but would also be the first to line up for a slot on a Tucker Carlson broadcast. The New York surrogate (whose name is simply New York) is now hiding in a forgotten subway tunnel, only barely breathing. But New York, unlike the other city surrogates in the novel, is unique in that the city has a surrogate for the city as a whole and each borough has an individual stand-in.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Transscalar CritiqueClimate, Blackness, Crisis, pp. 110 - 139Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2023