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The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch marking humanity's alteration of the Earth: its rock structure, environments, atmosphere. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene offers the most comprehensive survey yet of how literature can address the social, cultural, and philosophical questions posed by the Anthropocene. This volume addresses the old and new literary forms - from novels, plays, poetry, and essays to exciting and evolving genres such as 'cli-fi', experimental poetry, interspecies design, gaming, weird, ecotopian and petro-fiction, and 'new' nature writing. Studies range from the United States to India, from Palestine to Scotland, while addressing numerous global signifiers or consequences of the Anthropocene: catastrophe, extinction, 'fossil capital', warming, politics, ethics, interspecies relations, deep time, and Earth. This unique Companion offers a compelling account of how to read literature through the Anthropocene and of how literature might yet help us imagine a better world.
Arguing that literature requires alternatives to genres such as cli-fi – that focus on the ‘after’, the catastrophe, rather than causes or solutions – this chapter examines Palestinian literature. It draws on Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Men in the Sun (1962) to narrate a tradition of writing that has emerged from interconnected processes of resource extraction, colonialism and fossil capital; and, historically, from the nakba (‘catastrophe’) – the displacement or ethnic cleansing of 70,000 Palestinians in 1948 – and enforced migration to, for example, an unbearably hot Iraq. He notes that a twentieth-century literary tradition – of poets (Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Marwan Darwish) and novelists (Susan Abulhawa, Liyana Badr) – both recalls a fecund Palestine, pre-oil, and resists the forces and interests of the fossil economy. With the experience of displacement and environmental devastation increasingly globalised, the enduring resistance that characterises Palestinian literature can be an exemplar for literature not as resignation but as resistance to the accelerating, imperialising forces underlying the Capitalocene.
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