Cli-Fi and Class

Since its emergence in the late twentieth century, climate fiction--or cli-fi--has concerned itself as much with economic injustice and popular revolt as with rising seas and soaring temperatures. Indeed, with its insistent focus on redressing social disparities, cli-fi might reasonably be classified as a form of protest literature. As environmental crises escalate and inequality intensifies, literary writers and scholars alike have increasingly scrutinized the dual exploitations of the earth’s ecosystems and the socioeconomically disadvantaged.Cli-Fi and Class focuses on the representation of class dynamics in climate-change narratives. With fifteen essays on the intersection of the economic and the ecological--addressing works ranging from the novels of Joseph Conrad, Cormac McCarthy, and Octavia Butler to the film Black Panther and the Broadway musical Hadestown--this collection unpacks the complex ways economic exploitation impacts planetary well-being, and the ways climatic change shapes those inequities in turn.