Settler Belonging in Crisis: Non-Indigenous Australian Literary Climate Fiction and the Challenge of “The New”

Abstract

In the past decade, an increasing number of novelists have undertaken the task of narrativizing and representing climate change. In both the academy and beyond, this undertaking has often been theorized not only as representational, but also as motivation to a “wider and deeper climate consciousness” (Schneider-Mayerson 474) in an overtly political and pedagogical project (Chakrabarty 2009, 2012; Rigby; Siperstein). Several theorists have suggested that imagining future scenarios such as climate change through fiction may be more effective as a communicative strategy, because of fiction’s capacity to “provide a personal viewpoint” (Pahl and Bauer 157), to enable reflection on a reader’s own “commitments and concerns” (Miall and Kuiken 351), and to ‘augment everyday cognition’ (Oatley 618). Similar sentiments echo in the literary market, as evidenced by the British writer Nina Allen, who noted that, celebrating the achievements of Cynan Jones’ 2018 novel Stillicide, many recent climate fictions might be characterized by their efforts to “imagine the effects of climate at both the global and personal level” (2019). Under such paradigms, the power of climate fiction is located in its capacity to breach the gap between the expected social realism of contemporary litera ture—and its common focalization through individual experience—with the spectacular, world bending realities of climate crisis.