Trauma, Implication and Anticipation: Representations of Climate Catastrophe in Oana Aristide’s Under the Blue

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ABSTRACT Twenty-first century novels that engage with climate emergency often reflect and reinforce extreme psychological manifestations best understood as climate trauma. In its most palpable form, E. Ann Kaplan suggests the sense of futurity embedded within climate trauma manifests as ‘disturbing future-oriented cognitions and imaginations’ (2016, p. 2) as a direct temporal reverse of the temporality commonly associated with trauma. However, a central focus on extreme manifestations risks obscuring gradual and more elusive forms of climate trauma generated by embedded structural violence. As such, this article focuses on Oana Aristide’snovel Under the Blue (2021) to establish how the futurity Kaplan situates at the centre of climate trauma intersects with an underlying sense of collective responsibility for structurally violent regimes. Such a responsibility can be understood through Michael Richardson’s theory of the implicated subject. While Richardson’s implication is primarily situated in relation to systemic racialised violence, Aristide’s novel demonstrates its value in providing a mode to consider how the Global North, is disproportionately responsible for and yet still subjected to the violence of climate degradation.