Storytelling in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This article examines the 2015 book Love in the Anthropocene and storytelling in relation to ecological collapse. Climate fiction may engage elements of craft, in particular Enlightenment iterations of selfhood, that may contribute, regardless of a story’s content, to destructive dynamics of the Anthropocene. This article proposes that writing fiction is both an act of bearing witness and of creating reality. It explores how the “post-development” (Kothari et al. 2019) framework of the Pluriverse might inform the way fiction is told and consumed in the twenty-first century, and to what ends. Stories that offer humans hope and justice, and help us navigate ecological collapse, may have less to do with realistic and cautionary apocalyptic and dystopian fictional worlds than with a view of the world the Pluriverse helps describe: one that emphasizes relationality (as is fundamental among many Indigenous and Zen Buddhist worldviews, for example) and understands reality as constituted by many worlds, kinds of worlds, and ways of being.