Anthropocene imaginaries and the role of climate fiction

This chapter clarifies the role that the concept of ‘imaginary’ plays in EPT, as well as its potential to inform understandings of agency, power, and action in the Anthropocene. In the first section, I offer a non-exhaustive overview of the place of imaginaries in EPT and highlight the multiple ways in which the concept informs our understanding of how particular collective visions of the future shape political expectations and actions in the Anthropocene. In the second section, I propose that reading climate fiction as EPT contributes to the latter's epistemological renewal, particularly concerning the problem of ‘whiteness’ that characterises political thinking. To illustrate this argument, the chapter briefly engages with three climate fiction novels, including Octavia Butler's Parable series. The chapter then makes the case for shifting analytical attention to texts, ways of knowing, and imaginaries that resist the reproduction of the epistemological and ontological positions that created the Anthropocene.