29 May 2025, 3pm - 5pm

Café Husovka, Husova 9, Prague 1

Public lecture, free entry.

Abstract:

The talk scrutinizes a pervasive trend across U.S. climate fiction: the simultaneous invocation and absenting of Indigenous perspectives. It will focus on two recent novels, Jenny Offill's Weather and Lydia Millet's A Children's Bible (both 2020), which employ comedic elements as they participate in this trend. Nicole Seymour finds that, in rendering Indigenous peoples absent, climate fiction thereby evades confronting colonization as a primary driver of climate change. This move fits within the larger framework that geographer Erik Swyngedouw terms “post-political climate populism”: a way of thinking about climate change that fails to grasp “the fundamental socio-ecological relations that constitute the problem in the first place.” She also places these novels' comedic elements in larger context; while they come from Left-wing writers, they echo the recent far-Right and white supremacist use of comedy to evade responsibility for social injustices.

Nicole Seymour, Professor, California State University, Fullerton, (USA), works in the environmental humanities, focusing specifically on the relation between queerness, affect, literature, and other cultural forms. Her first book Strange Natures (2013) won the 2015 scholarly book award from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). Her second book Bad Environmentalism came out in 2018 with the University of Minnesota Press.

Nicole Seymour will be Visiting Scholar in CETE-P in May 2025.