The American Climate Emergency Narrative

“Johan Höglund has given us a powerful and insightful account of how American hegemony has produced not only climate crisis but a self-serving emergency narrative. Gracefully and clearly written, his book illuminates the entangled relations of cultural power, capitalist rapacity, and the American war machine in the making of climate crisis.” —Jason W. Moore, Binghamton University, USA “A stunning, original and compelling reading of American cultural work that fully realises the long roots of capitalism’s climate emergency. Höglund takes a world-ecological lens to an innovative and impressive range of texts and in so doing repurposes our understanding of the climate narrative.” —Graeme Macdonald, University of Warwick, UK “Höglund’s work is critical to understanding the current cultural moment in the US, wherein the ‘policing of the imagination’ is resisted at the margins, while cultural elites and the US state promote climate emergency narratives that attempt to naturalize alternatives to the socio-ecological violence of capitalist expansion via imperialism and colonialism.” —Hannah Holleman, Amherst College, USA “Moving from plantation cultures to the post-apocalyptic, Höglund’s indispensable study proposes a corrective to conventional ecocritical readings.” —Pramod K. Nayar, University of Hyderabad, India This open access book reveals how much of what has been called “climate fiction” casts ecological breakdown as an emergency for American capitalist modernity rather than for the planet. The book traces the origins of this narrative back to the arrival of settler capitalism in America, when the understanding of the planet and its people as extractable resources was established. Since then, this narrative has elided the violent history of the climate crisis while at the same time leveraging the military as a bulwark against the crises capitalism has caused, the people it has uprooted, even the ailing planet itself. Johan Höglund is Professor of English at Linnaeus University, Sweden.