Deadline: December 1, 2024
Contact: April Anson, Assistant Professor, University of Connecticut
Email: april.anson@uconn.edu
Phone: +503 5039367818
Panel Proposal for “Collective Atmospheres: Air, Intimacy, and Inequality”
2025 ASLE Biennial Conference
July 8-11, 2025 at the University of Maryland
On August 3, 2019, a self-identified ecofascist murdered 23 people and injured 23 others in El Paso, Texas. Minutes before the murders, the perpetrator posted a manifesto to the online message board 8chan detailing his motives for targeting the “Hispanic invasion” supposedly precipitated by climate change. Taking climate change as the new frontier condition, the mass murderer projected himself into an imagined future where he was, like Native people, the victim of invasion. While the El Paso murderer’s manifesto is merely the latest in a tradition that uses environmental concerns to justify violence, it exemplifies the ways, just as white supremacy is embedded in everyday infrastructures, so too, it is rooted in a suffocating, self-referential narrative tradition. Just as fascism never springs from nowhere, ecofascism creeps in our metaphors, media, and ideas of environmental health and security. This roundtable session will explore the rise of ecofascism today, its narrative and historical precedents, contemporary politics, and strategies for working against possible futures of climate fascism.
Possible questions include but are not limited to:
• What role does literature play in mediating the metaphoric and material rise of both ecofascism and atmospheric carbon count today?
• Can there be a “far-right ecologism” without the nation?
• Was the El Paso murderer really killing in the name of the “ecological goals”? What does that tell us about his (rather underdeveloped) ecological agenda, and what about the future prospects of ecofascism?
• What can narrative and historical precedents teach us about the rise of climate fascism today?
• What are the implications of the rise of ecofascism or climate fascism today for teaching, organizing, and storytelling?
Please submit your proposals to April Anson (april.anson@uconn.edu) by December 1, 2024.
Posted on September 30, 2024
