Chapter 2 - Ghosts and Reparations

Summary

This chapter argues that climate justice must be understood in the context of reparations for enslavement and requires a speculative recentering of history. Climate ethics often employs the lenses of corrective justice, the payment of debt, and distributive justice, the equitable sharing of benefits and burdens of greenhouse gas production. Placing climate disruption in the history of diaspora and enslavement allows for a theorization of reparative justice. In making this argument, I dialogue with the work of Octavia Butler, whose novels Kindred, Parable of the Sower, and Parable of the Talents imagine climate futures without seeking to escape responsibilities to the past. Furthermore, Butler’s alternative history and speculative fiction place African American resistance, and especially African American women’s creation of freedom, at the center of history and the construction of more just and sustainable futures.