Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory
2017; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13534645.2017.1374518
ISSN1460-700X
Autores Tópico(s)Geographies of human-animal interactions
ResumoIn this essay I will explore a narrative device familiar from sci-fi and dystopian fiction that is commonly used in literary and cultural responses to climate change, and which strikes me as particularly suggestive for thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene for memory and the field of memory studies.Works as generically diverse as Franny Armstrong's film The Age of Stupid, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's fictional future history The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, George Turner's novel The Sea and Summer, and Jan Zalasiewicz's popular science book The Earth after Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?all feature a historian, archivist, or geologist who looks back on our present moment from a distant vantage point in a dystopian, (almost) post-human future irrevocably marked by climate change.These works, and others like it, can thus be seen to respond to the challenge of the Anthropocenean era that requires the future anterior tense for its very conceptualizationto consider human and inhuman scales in relation to one another. 1 The preoccupation with anticipated memory and preliminary or proleptic mourning evident in fictional future histories of climate change, which subvert the customary parameters of memory in terms of both scale and directionality, resonates with recent calls for memory studies to become more future-oriented instead of merely backward-looking.Scholars typically seek to make memory studies relevant to the present and the future by forging more robust links between memory and transitional justice or human rights discourses.Climate change fiction of the future-history variety presents another promising avenue for further research in the same spirit.
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