The (often memetic) figure of the white female ‘Karen’ has surged to prominence of late, moving from social media vernacular into broader usage at exactly the moment when twin crises of public health and racial social justice have fomented momentous change and uncertainty in American life. The angry ‘Karen’ is invoked to indicate her manipulation of her racial power, but she is equally significant, we suggest, for her positioning within a pre-existing antagonistic service economy.

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One of a growing group of television series that can be classified as climate fiction, Occupied takes as its premise a hostile political response to Norway’s sudden move towards energy transition. Occupied draws on the long tradition of the Norwegian occupation drama, while also resonating with contemporary tensions between Russia and its neighbours. Mobilizing familiar structures of feeling common to many cli-fi texts as well as recent news cycles, Occupied brings together the genre conventions of political thrillers, occupation dramas and extreme weather/disaster films. With its ensemble cast that explores the conflicting loyalties and personal stakes involved in the emerging crisis, the series portrays the complexities of its fictional petropolitics as a layered accumulation of historical and recent memory shot through with personal and political investments of every conceivable kind that premediate possible futures in the Anthropocene.

This essay argues that the black-audience musical westerns of the late 1930s attempted to reconfigure African American national identity in their casting but also by strategically using anachronism and geographical juxtaposition. These westerns created a dual present by using the trope of contemporary Harlem alongside the nineteenth-century setting, thereby ironically echoing the western expansionist movement in a cinematic African American West.

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