The Anthropocene Unconscious Climate Catastrophe Culture

From Ducks, Newburyport to zombie movies and the Fast and Furious franchise, how climate anxiety permeates our culture

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 won 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 Big Echo, the Boston Review, Electric Sheep, Fabrikzeitung, Film International, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Mithila Review, Salvage and Vector. He is a former Editor of Science Fiction Film and Television, a journal he founded, and of Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory. He co-founded and co-edits the Studies in Global Science Fiction monograph series for Palgrave Macmillan.