This seminar takes the global environmental crisis – the spectre of ecological and even planetary collapse due to anthropogenic climate change – as a starting point to consider the ways that global crime fiction has sought to expose, mitigate, reflect and reconfigure impending catastrophe. Contributions are invited that consider how or how well ‘the (crime) genre’s central ideological concerns with culpability and criminality’ align to the climate crisis (King 2021). Participants are invited to explore the implications for our understanding of genre; whether crime fiction that addresses climate change and environmental catastrophe continues to function as crime fiction or whether the resulting mutations require new descriptive categories (e.g. King’s "crimate" fiction). Other approaches might be to think about crime fiction’s capacities for addressing the uneven effects of environmental crises and the implications for vulnerable transnational populations especially in the Global South. We are also keen to extend our understanding of crime fiction’s long history of engaging with toxic settings and environmental crises to include other extinction threats (e.g. planetary disasters, nuclear devastation, pandemics and other dystopian imaginaries). This seminar is part of an ongoing enquiry into the complex relations between the situatedness and specificities of crime fiction as genre (and of individual crime stories) and the wider frames of comparative analysis and global politics (see ACLA 2023, 2022, 2021, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015).
Organizers: Andrew Pepper, Nicole Kenley and Patrick Deer