For the planet. For home”
Generating planetary responsibility in the climate fiction of Los Angeles
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12880896 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Edwin Gilson (0009-0001-1204-0267, University of Surrey, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 10-12 |
| Publication date | 2023-10-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Literature Compass (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1741-4113 • E-ISSN: 1741-4113 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/lic3.12742 |
| OpenAlex | W4387449218 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 17 |
This article argues that three prominent recent works of Los Angeles climate fiction—Maria Amparo Escandon's L . A . Weather (2021), Alexandra Kleeman's Something New Under the Sun (2021) and Paul Beatty's The Sellout (2016)—generate a sense of planetary responsibility. Despite their regional settings, these novels possess a planetary consciousness, illuminating the local‐global connectivity of climate change and the Anthropocene. As one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitting cities in the world, L.A. drives climate injustice, with its gargantuan energy consumption having an adverse impact on populations both within and far beyond its own borders. This article explains how literature, and climate fiction particularly, can highlight this inequality at micro and macro scales, and encourage collective opposition to it. I argue that the novels of Escandon, Kleeman and Beatty conjure the impression of responsibility identified by Kristian Shaw and Sara Upstone in their overview of post‐postmodern fiction, while also exhibiting the ‘planetarity’ discussed by Amy Elias and Christian Moraru: a term to describe the global worldview of contemporary culture. In applying these concepts to the novels examined here, I ultimately contend that Los Angeles climate fiction demystifies the spatial and political dimensions of the Anthropocene, generating planetary responsibility and addressing local and global injustice
Aesthetics · Anthropocene · Art · Climate change · Climate justice · Environmental ethics · Global warming · Greenhouse gas · Injustice · Literature · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Sociology · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Philosophy · Geology · Oceanography
The Planetary Turn
Storytelling environmental justice
Toxic Communities
Seeking Spatial Justice
Ecology of Fear
The Great Derangement
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Slow violence and toxic geographies
The Transglossic
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet
We Have Never Been Modern
Turn West
Planetarity' (Box 4, Welt)
Planetary Los Angeles
The Climate of History
| Highly cited | No |
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