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Resumo

Climate justice activists envision a 'postcarbon' future that not only transforms energy infrastructures but also redresses the fossil fuel economy's long-standing racial inequalities. Yet this anti-racist rebranding of the 'zero emissions' telos does not tend to the racial grief that's foundational to white supremacy. Accordingly, I ask: can we address racial oppression through a 'just transition' to a 'postcarbon' moment? In response, I connect today's postcarbon imaginary with yesterday's postcolonial imaginary. Drawing from research on US-based climate activism, I explore how the utopic rhetoric of a 'just transition' is instantiated in practice. I argue that the racialized absences constitutive of what scholars call 'postcolonial amnesia' are operative in the anti-racist move to a postcarbon moment. This postcarbon imaginary formulates the vulnerability of people of color to biophysical disasters as the raison d'être for infrastructural transformation. This, I argue, has the effect of overlooking the ways in which racial grief inheres in such vulnerability and the capacity of energy infrastructures to uphold racist hierarchies. I situate this 'postcarbon amnesia' in Anne Cheng's framework for differentiating 'grief' from 'grievance,' calling for renewable energy transitions that move away from enumerative grievances and toward a sobering recognition of racial grief.

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