Repairing the Broken Earth: N.K. Jemisin on race and environment in transitions

Abstract

Sustainability transitions tend to be seen as technical, not social, affairs. Mainstream scholars and practitioners do not very often acknowledge environmental and social justice in their transitions work. They seldom recognize rights for racially marginalized people, or the possible existence of rights of Earth. Nor do they query whether they are exaggerating the reach of scientific and technological solutions. By contrast, some recent ecological science fiction writing has begun to place these issues at the center of transitions. In the Broken Earth series, N.K. Jemisin explores Earth through the lens of racial and ecological injustice. She interrogates four themes relevant to transitions. How should we live in a climate-changed world? What role does racial and social subordination play in destroying the environment? What are the dangers of hubris in seeking out a fundamental change through science and technology that cannot be readily controlled after all? How should we think about Earth itself? I conclude with some thoughts on how Earth could be made ‘unbroken’ again through integrating recognition, humility, renewal, and redistribution into transitions.

A look‐back from the future: Anthropogenic crisis and memory in N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy

“…Although critical for controlling seismic activity, and thus ensuring survival, orogenes are generally feared, controlled, and despised as the Other; tolerated and allowed to live only if they prove obedient and useful for the society. As Jemisin's narrative focuses on the protagonists from this marginalized and oppressed group and invites the readers to adopt their perspective, it might be read as “a singular call for racial and social justice as a way to protect both human nature and non‐human nature” (Iles, 2019, 7).…”

“… 2 2 Recently, Alastair Iles (2019) discussed the trilogy within the context of sustainability transitions; Kim Wickham (2019) read it as a contemporary narrative of slavery and examined the role of second‐person narration; Ferrández San Miguel (2020) interpreted the series as one that develops a new model of posthuman ethics; Dowdall (2020) situated the novels within the context of Afrofuturism and geological turn; and Sands (2021) drew attention to the ways in which the last novel of the series reimagines the sociocultural origins of the Anthropocene. …”

Reparation ecology and climate risk in Latin-America: Experiences from four countries

“…This includes a complex and multi-layered dynamic in which neo-colonial policies and market strategies interact with limited democracies (Lautier, 2010;Allegretti et al, 2013) and unruled violation of human and social rights, particularly so in rural and paramilitary conflict-prone areas (Pérez-Rincón, 2014) and urban peripheries (de Feltran, 2010;Moreira Accioly et al, 2020). Such development has always implied significant biases and harsher penalizations against women, Indigenous groups, afro-descendants (Iles, 2019) and other social minorities and identities. The deforestation of the Amazonia, often depicted by national and international media, is but the tip of the iceberg of a far more dramatic scenario in the region of environmental degradation, dismantling of environmental and social protection, and violent pursuit of environmental and social activists (Brandão et al, 2018;Lampis et al, 2020).…”

What If: multispecies justice as the expression of utopian desire

“…In fact, Jemisin's work captures Earth and its inhabitants through powerful allegories of universal connectedness -neatly termed "planetary weirding" (Ingwersen 2019) -that resonate with key insights from multispecies justice. What is more, the Broken Earth trilogy also sheds light on the shifting intersections of class, gender, racial and environmental harms -yet another theme that is essential for the normative vision underpinning multispecies justice (Iles 2019, Bastiaansen 2020). Hence, What-If narratives pursue plotlines that generate estrangement (Suvin 1978): they come up with imagined scenarios, which defamiliarize us from what we habitually take for granted.…”