Deadline: 1 February 2025
Contact: David Shackleton
Email: shackletond@cardiff.ac.uk
PLANETARY FICTION: AFRICAN LITERATURE AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Modern Fiction Studies Special Issue Call for Papers
Guest Editors: Nedine Moonsamy (Johannesburg) and David Shackleton (Cardiff)
Deadline for Submissions: 1 February 2025
Modern Fiction Studies invites essay submissions for a special issue on “Planetary Fiction: African Literature and Climate Change.” At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in 2020, Ugandan climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate was cropped out of an Associated Press photograph that shows other young activists (Isabelle Axelsson, Greta Thunberg, Loukina Tille, and Luisa Neubauer). As the only Black African activist in a photo with white Europeans, she commented: “You didn’t just erase a photo. You erased a continent.” Indeed, political ecologist Malcom Ferdinand contends that the erasure is typical of much environmentalism in the Global North, which seeks to account for the climate crisis without addressing issues of colonialism and race, and thereby perpetuates modernity’s “colonial fracture.” By contrast, this project turns to African literature to develop what Ferdinand calls a “decolonial ecology”—one that promises to transform the conceptual and political implications of the climate crisis. It recognizes African literature as the site of ecological thinking, which provides resources for what Ferdinand calls “world-making”: ways of living with human and non-human others on the Earth.
In literary studies, critics are increasingly turning to climate fiction or “cli-fi” to address global warming during a time of climate breakdown. By imagining future climate-changed worlds, writers and filmmakers can help us to understand the risks of global warming and associated phenomena, including extreme weather events, droughts, flooding, biodiversity loss, and species extinctions. Climate fiction also provides models for environmental activism, which can give a sense of agency in responding to the climate crisis. Yet while climate fiction is most often studied from a Euroamerican perspective, this project turns to African literature to rethink the climate crisis. In doing so, it builds on work in the emerging fields of the African environmental and energy humanities, including Cajetan Iheka’s positioning of Africa as “the ground zero of the energy humanities.” It seeks to identify urgent topics of environmental concern, and develop new collaborative methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches. It welcomes further theorization of the key term “planetary fiction,” which might initially be understood in a capacious sense to include many genres and media (including orature, novels, short stories, poetry, film, and drama), and to refer to those works of fiction that register the planetary transformations associated with global warming. Ultimately, this project uses such fiction to explore the conditions of what Achille Mbembe calls “planetary habitability.”
We invite essays that address any aspect of African literature and climate change. Topics might include but are not limited to the following:
• African futures: scenarios, pathways, and planning
• Speculative fiction: Africanfuturism, science fiction, and fantasy
• Energy transitions: fossil fuels and renewable energy
• Extractivism: fossil fuels, transition minerals, and sacrifice zones
• Global warming and the uneven distribution of environmental risk
• Drought, water intrastructure, and hydropolitcs
• Imperial ecologies: colonialism, race, and climate colonialism
• Climate finance and global capital: sustainability, resilience, and climate resilient development
• Chinese development and the One Belt, One Road Initiative
• Narratives of environmental crisis: Anthropocene, African Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Racial Capitalocene, Plantationocene, and Necrocene
• Climate and environmental activism
• Planetary politics and habitability: decolonial ecologies, loss and damage, reparations, multispecies flourishing, and global climate justice
Essays should be 7,000–9,000 words, including all quotations and bibliographic references, and should follow the MLA Handbook (9th edition) for internal citations and Works Cited. Please submit your essay via the online submission form at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mfs.
Queries ahead of submission are welcomed, and may be directed to Nedine Moonsamy (nedinem@uj.ac.za) and David Shackleton (shackletond@cardiff.ac.uk).
Posted on March 7, 2024
