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Geological Insurrections: Politics of Planetary Weirding from China Miéville to N. K. Jemisin

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Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic

Part of the book series: Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ((GSLS))

Abstract

Building on recent exchanges between ecocritical scholarship and the genre of the New Weird, Moritz Ingwersen introduces N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy (2015–2017) as a literary work in which the estrangement of planetary–human relationships motivates new modes of collaboration, reconnection, and kinship. Through an examination of geological subjectivities, he connects Jemisin to the New Weird and establishes a dialogue with China Miéville’s short story “The Dusty Hat” (2015) to demonstrate a shared interest in political revisions of the Anthropocene that derive from the imagination of geomorphic agency and the insurrection of Earth–human hybrids. Drawing attention to Jemisin’s entanglement of resource extraction, displacement, and dehumanization, her novels are mobilized for a critique of the historical complicities among geology, liberal humanism, and (settler)colonialism.

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Ingwersen, M. (2019). Geological Insurrections: Politics of Planetary Weirding from China Miéville to N. K. Jemisin. In: Greve, J., Zappe, F. (eds) Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28116-8_6

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