Climate Disorientation and Poe’s Uncanny Atmospheres

This article highlights the entanglement of racial and climate anxiety in early nineteenth-century US culture. It does so by examining the lesser-known climate theories of early racial scientists—from Thomas Jefferson to Samuel George Morton—alongside Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). As racial scientists redefined race as a permanent, interior trait, they also redefined climate as predictable, unthreatening, and indicative of racial divisions across the globe. Drawing on these ideas, Poe’s novel illuminates the climate anxiety that underpinned scientific racism, depicting a world filled with climate disorientation—uncanny moments when a familiar, seemingly stable climate disappears or is otherwise disturbed. Time and again, Poe’s protagonist draws on scientific racism to soothe the unsettling sensation of climate disorientation. Nevertheless, while the Narrative reinforces scientific racism, it also begins to imagine an alternative view centered on ecological humility, an outlook that recognizes the intimacy and unknowability of an entangled world. Defining climate broadly to include atmospheric, ecological, and social norms, this essay shows how, for many nineteenth-century white intellectuals, fears about racial uncertainty were also fears about climate uncertainty—how a desire for a reliable climate was also a desire for racial permanence and division. What might it mean to disentangle those fears and desires today, in an era of perpetual climate disorientation?