Cirrus@Austlit

This book presents an innovative and imaginative reading of contemporary Australian literature in the context of unprecedented ecological crisis.

'The Australian continent has seen significant, rapid changes to its cultures and land-use from the impact of British colonial rule, yet there is a rich history of Indigenous land-ethics and cosmological thought. By using the age-old idea of ‘cosmos’—the order of the world—to foreground ideas of a good order and chaos, reciprocity and more-than-human agency, this book interrogates the Anthropocene in Australia, focusing on notions of colonisation, farming, mining, bioethics, technology, environmental justice and sovereignty. It offers ‘cosmological readings’ of a diverse range of authors—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—as a challenge to the Anthropocene’s decline-narrative. As a result, it reactivates ‘cosmos’ as an ethical vision and a transculturally important counter-concept to the Anthropocene. Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell argues that the arts can help us envision radical cosmologies of being in and with the planet, and to address the very real social and environmental problems of our era.

'This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and postcolonial, transcultural and Indigenous studies, with a primary focus on Australian, New Zealand, Oceanic and Pacific area studies.' (Publication summary)

'This essay explores Briohny Doyle’s dystopian climate fiction novel The Island Will Sink (2016), which dramatises the failure of responding ethically to climate change, as protagonists create a sensationalist aesthetic spectacle out of environmental disaster. The ubiquitous narrative of awaiting the ‘final apocalypse’ takes centre stage, as the Pacific island of Pitcairn is in the process of sinking with sea-level rise, an event that is anxiously anticipated in various media. Although awaiting the apocalypse has become a magnetic trope of the climate fiction genre, and is often satirised, this novel merits critical attention because it highlights an important dimension of climate change: the fact that it is always mediated. Because climate change can only be experienced partially, we rely on mediation for understanding the phenomenon as a whole. The Island Will Sink, however, depicts the aesthetic exploitation of climate catastrophe in various media; through the ‘emotional overwhelm’ of immersive cinema, the producers aim to capitalise on apocalyptic experience and premediate trauma. The essay argues that The Island Will Sink exposes the dangers of individual and collective memory that is divorced from the environment, as it favours simulacra over an engagement with lived experience in a particular ecosystem – in this case Pitcairn. In this way, the novel stages the perils of an over-abundance of dystopian affects and narratives: while they may hold the potential to warn and shock, they can also paralyse individuals’ responses to climate change. Though the novel presents what I call a ‘negative cosmology’ with no way out, this essay draws attention to the recent ecocritical turn towards formerly neglected affects and genres, such as pleasure, humour and survival.' (Introduction)