Climate Fiction as Decolonial Narrative at Flights of Foundry
Image by ZENON JUSZKIEWICZ from Pixabay
One of the panels I attended during Flights of Foundry was on the ways to decolonize climate fiction narratives. The panels talked about many of the very common tropes they’ve seen in climate fiction that tend to be from a colonial perspective, followed by ways to tell climate fiction stories from decolonial perspectives. They also toyed with the idea of whether there were ways to “flip the script” on some of the colonial tropes to decolonize them, and also gave some examples of media that does well with decolonial narratives.
Several of the colonial narratives that these creators often see in climate fiction are the ideas of an interspecies relationship that doesn’t recognize the power that one species has over the other, exploration narratives (finding a new planet and more), man vs. nature, and ignoring community in favor of rugged individualism. On the flipside, some of the decolonial narratives include communities, generational help, and reckoning with history. The last of those really spoke to me as a historian.
Overall, the panelists found that it’s often difficult to take the traditionally colonial narratives and decolonize them. There may be ways to partially decolonize these tropes, but rarely can they be entirely flipped in a functional way that doesn’t turn someone else into the colonizing force (i.e., reverse colonization).
My takeaways from this panel were primarily to look at what I’m putting into my climate fiction and find ways to emphasize the decolonial aspects of it, rather than perpetuating the colonial mindset and narratives.
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