Aesthetics of the fucked

This article argues that in the face of climate chaos, which disproportionately affects minoritised communities and populations, an aesthetics of the present needs to take into account the strange moods and temporalities of living within a disaster. Apocalypse is unevenly distributed and systemic ra...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Textual practice 2023-09, Vol.37 (9), p.1388-1404
Main Author: Grattan, Sean
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aesthetics
Climate change
ecological crisis
Environmental risk
Fiction
LGBTQ studies
Minority & ethnic groups
N.K. Jemisin
Racialization
Racism
salvage
Speculative fiction
Utopia
Utopias
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Summary:This article argues that in the face of climate chaos, which disproportionately affects minoritised communities and populations, an aesthetics of the present needs to take into account the strange moods and temporalities of living within a disaster. Apocalypse is unevenly distributed and systemic racism cannot be untangled from narratives of climate catastrophe. It is for this reason that speculative fiction, particularly by queer and BIPOC authors, is particularly well oriented to envisioning global futures, and for grappling with what utopia looks like now. The essay turns to N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season as one example of the imbrication of climate chaos and racialisation. This reading describes what I am calling an aesthetics of the fucked that takes into account the queer time of having to think and live within multiple spatial and temporal scales all attenuated to crisis. What forms of belonging might come into being in the wash of ecological destruction and salvage epistemologies? What happens when the new weird becomes the new normal?
ISSN:0950-236X
1470-1308
DOI:10.1080/0950236X.2023.2248795