Landwork after Hurricane Helene Through the Lens of BIPOC Speculative Fiction

• In Event: Black and Indigenous Ecologies: Race, Place, and the Politics of Water

Description for Program

Landwork after Hurricane Helene Through the Lens of BIPOC Speculative Fiction With a certain mindset, one might consider speculative fiction as a means of entertainment or an escape from reality. More specifically, the speculative fiction realms of fantasy, science fiction, and climate fiction–with their elements of magic, ultra advanced technologies of the future, and world-ending environmental and ecological destruction–might easily be written off as distant, dissociated worlds or unlikely futures. However, authors like Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemison, and Cherie Dimaline create worlds that propel us inward, calling us to confront our relationship to crises. Furthermore, these authors’ worlds eerily reflect our sick planet back to us and urge us to uncomfortably reroot ourselves into the dirt once more where we will experience death and rebirth as inevitabilities but also silver linings.
This presentation will investigate and reveal the theories of care or “hyperempathy” presented by Black and Indigenous feminist Sci-Fi and Cli-Fi writers that motion toward interventions of mutual aid via sustainable and honorable landwork practices. By taking a closer look at Black and Indigenous farmers, gardeners, and landworkers alongside Black and Indigenous Sci-Fi and Cli-Fi writers we will come to recognize the worlds within our own that do not live in fear of crises, but know crises to be unavoidably ongoing yet survivable through collective imagining, learning, and stewardship. The Black and Indigenous farmers in focus will mainly be those impacted by Hurricane Helene across western North Carolina in the Appalachian mountains who are undertaking the cumbersome and crucial processes of rebuilding everything they once knew into what is ever becoming—this is not a romanticized take on climate change or its impacts on people of color in rural areas, but a recognition of the creativity, care, and thrift of Black and Indigenous thinkers, feelers, and knowers who use the body (mind, sweat, flesh) to bring life into and out of being as a ritual of ultraterrestrial care.

Author

• Allani Dayi, Northwestern University