Orientalising environmental citizenship: climate change, migration and the potentiality of race

Abstract This article theorises the notion of environmental citizenship in the context of climate change and migration discourse. The central claim of the article is that postcolonial theory is inadequate for fully coming to terms with the way in which the figure of the climate change migrant works as an oppositional referent to the environmental citizen. This is because postcolonial theory tends to trace how the colonial past animates the present, whereas climate change and migration discourse is written almost exclusively in the future-conditional tense. The resulting analysis focuses on the consequences the future-conditionality of climate change and migration discourse has for conceptualising environmental citizenship in the context of climate change. One such consequence is that the category 'race' must be reconceptualised as a future potential of bodies rather than the effect of historical signification. Keywords: climate changemigrationenvironmental citizenracepostcolonial theory Acknowledgements I wish to thank Engin Isin and two anonymous referees for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Thanks as well to the participants at the 'Citizenship and the Environment' session of the Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship Conference, 6–7 February 2012, Open University and to those at the Performing Geopolitics workshop at Durham University 22–23 June 2011. The article's shortcomings are, of course, entirely my own. Notes 1. The only named victim in the film is a White man, who recounts the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. It is noteworthy that the filmmakers chose a White man to speak of the effects of Hurricane Katrina given that the losses and suffering associated with New Orleans were overwhelming born by Black people. 2. http://www.postcardsfromthefuture.co.uk. 3. The film debuted at the Copenhagen meeting of the UNFCCC and has subsequently toured throughout the USA. The film's website contains a list of all its tour venues which are mainly film festivals and college and university campuses.