Shackleton, David
2027.
A ‘fault line of pain’: N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, global risk and the Afrofuturist planetary imagination.
Ferdinand, Simon and Sterling, Colin, eds.
Aesthetics of Geopower: Contested Planetary Imaginaries,
Geotheory,
Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press,
pp. 128-142.
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Abstract
This chapter argues that N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015–17) uses the conventions of epic fantasy to re-imagine global risks and contest emerging forms of neoliberal Earth politics. Critics have been quick to situate the series in relation to debates about the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which humans have fundamentally changed the Earth system. Yet this chapter moves beyond a focus on the Anthropocene to consider its staging of global risk. To do so, it builds on an ecocritical tradition of risk criticism and recent theorizations of “geopower” to read the trilogy alongside (what I call) the “global risk imaginaries” that are shaped by the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and academic studies of “global catastrophic” and “existential” risk. Notably, I argue that Jemisin’s trilogy opposes the World Economic Forum’s utopian vision of a reformed global capitalism, showing how such a vision threatens to reproduce racial and (neo-)colonial inequalities. Instead, the trilogy imagines more equitable responses to global risk that are based on principles of environmental justice, in what constitutes a key example of the Afrofuturist planetary imagination.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Status: | In Press |
| Schools: | Schools > Global Humanities Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy |
| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) |
| Publisher: | Edinburgh University Press |
| ISBN: | 9781399562010 |
| Related URLs: | |
| Date of First Compliant Deposit: | 3 November 2026 |
| Last Modified: | 04 Nov 2026 09:30 |
| URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/190628 |
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