The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture

Description

The art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness. The Anthropocene - the term given to this geological epoch in which humans, anthropos, are wreaking havoc on the earth - is to be found bubbling away everywhere in contemporary cultural production. Typically, discussions of how culture registers, figures and mediates climate change focus on 'climate fiction' or 'cli-fi', but The Anthropocene Unconscious is more interested in how the Anthropocene and especially anthropogenic climate destabilisation manifests in texts that are not overtly about climate change - that is, unconsciously. The Anthropocene, Mark Bould argues, constitutes the unconscious of 'the art and literature of our time'. Tracing the outlines of the Anthropocene unconscious in a range of film, television and literature - across a range of genres and with utter disregard for high-low culture distinctions - this playful and riveting book draws out some of the things that are repressed and obscured by the term 'the Anthropocene', including capital, class, imperialism, inequality, alienation, violence, commodification, patriarchy and racial formations. The Anthropocene Unconscious is about a kind of rewriting. It asks: what happens when we stop assuming that the text is not about the anthropogenic biosphere crises engulfing us? What if all the stories we tell are stories about the Anthropocene? About climate change?

Mark Bould is a Reader in Film and Literature at UWE Bristol. He is the author of four books of film theory, and has been awarded both the Science Fiction Research Association's Pilgrim Lifetime Achievement Award for Critical Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2016) and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts Distinguished Scholarship Award (2019). He has written for Boston Review, Electric Sheep, Fabrikzeitung, Film International, Los Angeles Review of Books, Salvage and Vector.

Praise for Science Fiction: Its scope is amazing ... It seems as if Bould has seen every science-fiction film ever made?and also, even more impressively, that he vividly remembers pretty much everything that he has seen ... Once I started reading, I found the book difficult to put down; and I quickly populated my Netflix queue with many of the films described in its pages that I had not already seen. In what other text can one peruse an account of orgiastic gender-role reversals in British psychedelic fantasies of the 1960s and 1970s, followed in the space of just a few pages by a summary of the alienating, depressing, and sterile "non-spaces" of neoliberal late modernity, as described by the anthropologist Marc Auge? Mark Bould has produced a consummate work of careful and sober scholarship, one that at the same time induces in the reader a condition of dizziness and delirium. -- Steven Shaviro * Science Fiction Studies * A vision from the future, a retrospective analysis of our present situation, a requiem for a world we have already lost. This is a deeply personal missive - and one that carries a powerful message: we conflate the fact and fiction of global destruction at our peril. -- John Gilbey * Times Higher Education * [Bould] is particularly good on film and its qualities ... while [his] critical arguments are carefully made, he is clear that his method includes reading an awareness of the Anthropocene into the cultural gems he examines. -- Jon Turney * The Arts Desk * Worthy and timely ... [The Anthropocene Unconscious] provide[s] us with a cultural critique that has the potential to reshape the way we think about all cultural forms, and the climate - literally - in which they are produced. -- Leila Sackur * It's Freezing in LA * Ebullient ... meshing high-theory with casual lyricism ... Bould's eco-socialist commitments seem increasingly inescapable. -- Lola Seaton * New Statesman * A swift, wide sweep ... the book's central argument is vital: our culture is submerged in climate catastrophe -- Oscar Rickett * i newspaper * Climate change, to Bould, is always on the peripheries of art, even if we can't confront it face-on, even if we would like to forget it, even when we think we were safe -- Lauren Sneade * Economy, Land & Climate Insight * Bould puts forward a compelling argument about what cultural criticism in the Anthropocene should be, and he does so with the hope of curtailing some of the slow violence and injustices of the many widely and unevenly distributed effects of climate change. -- Alison Sperling * Los Angeles Review of Books *