13 - Indigenous and Black Feminist Knowledge-Production, Speculative Science Stories, and Climate Change Literature

Summary

Some of the most vital contributions to recent climate change literature come not in the form of cli-fi fiction but in stories of speculative science written by Indigenous and Black women. Making Indigenous knowledge foundational to literary experimentation, Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi Nation) builds on Indigenous sciences, place-based knowledge, Indigenous storytelling traditions, and futuristic internet forms, connecting ecological and climate change literature to cultural practices inextricable from activism. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, on the other hand, centres Black and women of colour feminist knowledge-production in her contributions to transforming the literary, rethinking racial ecologies, and imagining different worlds in the face of colonialism, extractive racial capitalism, and climate change. In their experimental, activist, speculative science stories, these writers remember the knowledge of ancestors and the more-than-human world and imagine collective futures that swerve off the tracks of extractive capitalism’s never-ending disaster story and facile hopes for a techno-fix.