Against New-Worlding: Unsettling the Colonized Future in Environmental and Anthropocene Speculative Fiction

Abstract

Cultural responses to climate change, the Anthropocene, and other global crises have commonly been pitched at the scale of the planet and humanity as a whole. This is understandable given the scale of these problems, but this dissertation aims to challenge the ways in which this scalar framing serves a colonial and imperial vision of the world and the future. This research project works primarily at the intersection between ecocritical literary and cultural studies, Indigenous and settler colonial studies, and science fiction studies. Through close readings of six science/speculative fiction texts—three by Indigenous authors and three by non-Indigenous authors—it develops the concept of new-worlding and argues against its dominance in cultural imaginings of both utopian and apocalyptic climate futures. Broadly, new-worlding describes a fundamentally settler-colonial way of narrating the future in which either apocalyptic crisis remakes the world or “we” remake the world in order to avoid it. In either case, the newness of the remade world implies the termination of Indigenous worlds and futures which are relegated to the past as the survivors of the crisis become native to the new world. This narrative manifests in different ways in each of the non-Indigenous texts examined here and with varying degrees of critical awareness on the part of the authors. The Indigenous-authored texts, on the other hand, reveal the colonial ideologies lurking beneath through their rejection of such totalizing universal visions of the future, instead remaining steadfastly committed to Land as the locus of Indigenous futurities. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the only futures worth imagining are those that refuse to colonize the future, and that hold open the possibilities of decolonization and Indigenous futurity. Though the focus here is primarily aesthetic, the implications are more-than-aesthetic, especially now that we are seeing an increasing emphasis on “narrative” and “story” as crucial tools for motivating liberal and progressive politics. Thinking more deeply and critically about how the stories we tell do or do not take the settler-colonial future for granted will hopefully help us identify and resist anti-Indigenous narratives in responses to real-world crises.