Abstract Climate science has been one essential aspect of generating consensus that global warming is happening, is caused by human actions, and is harmful to biodiversity and the habitability of Earth for the human species. Climate action epistemologies draw on climate science to trace the origins of global warming to the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, the diverse epistemologies of the transnational climate justice movement take as a starting point the centuries of anti-Indigenous and anti-Black colonial dispossession, extraction, and enslavement through which global warming has emerged. Decolonial speculative fiction writers name systemic injustices of patriarchal colonial impunity through worldbuilding that foregrounds characters creating relationships of accountability and care on planet Earth: out of this world. This article focuses on how Amitav Ghosh’s speculative intertext of the novel Gun Island and non-fiction books The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable and The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis disrupts the neoliberal rationale of international climate action frameworks that limit accountability to pursuing state transparency through goal setting to mitigate the harms of global warming. I propose that a decolonial feminist reading of aesthetic invocations of the transnational uncanny that stage encounters with the agency of the more-than-human world is a method of reassembling the systematically repressed knowledge of colonial extraction and hierarchies of precarity through which the planetary condition of global warming has emerged.
Emily Merson (Tue,) studied this question.