In the text “The Great Derangement” written by Amitav Ghosh, it shows the main theme of being able to recognize the world we live in, to appreciate our home countries, the life within each country. However, the main focus switches to being able to recognize climate change, how it not only changes our home, our countries, but how we perceive the world. Not only the real world, but the literature world.

The text “The Great Derangement” written by Amitav Ghosh, goes onto speak about how Climate change is often perceived in various perspectives within the literary world. Ghosh speaks on how difficult it can be to apply climate change into fiction, where the reader doesn’t just think certain situations are fake or unrealistic. It’s hard to make the reader believe such cases actually happen in real life. Ghosh brings our various pieces of literature in this article. He tends to compare the views of each piece with how a writer would write about climate change, he often explains that when it comes to writing about climate change, it’s rare to create a mysterious feeling as well as trying to be realistic to not only the novel but to the reader as well. In the text Ghosh states ” …because to treat them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling- which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time.” Climate change is not a future situation that will happen, it isn’t about how mysterious it could be or realistic it should be but it focuses on how badly it can impact us, it’s a current situation that is happening worldwide. Ghosh goes into depth about how serious climate change and how hard it is to transfer such concept into the literary world.

In the text Ghosh points out a piece of literary evidence from the folk epic of the Sundarbans “Bon Bidir Johuranama (The Miracles of Bon BiBi) where he states “To look into the tiger’s eyes is to recognize a presence of which you are already aware, and in that moment of contact you are already aware; and in that moment of contact you realize that this presence possesses a similar awareness of you, even though it is not human.” This piece relates to the topic of climate change because it represent how, we as humans as well as literary writers acknowledge climate change and its affects, but we also know that climate change is evolving as time continues, we know the differences one can make but we’re already becoming affected by it as time goes by. This text is interesting because it not only points out the hardships of climate change as a concept in itself, it helps the reader understand the various perspectives looked within Climate Change

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LeMenager in Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre focuses on the Anthropocene and the direct relation to the climate change crisis that has worsened in the latter parts of the twentieth century. An important takeaway from this article is that when people hear about the climate crisis, they don’t imagine it to be a bigger problem than what it actually is. LeManager mentions how people see the news as a sort of dystopian update of what’s going on in the world, whether it’s based on crime, politics, or finances. (LeMenager 1) Yet the one thing that should be taken with more severity isn’t being portrayed in the news with the weight it carries. The climate affects everyone’s day-to-day life, and many people are looking at this climate crisis with the eyes of normal. Many things that have occurred in history have a connection to the climate as well.

LeMenager mentions Stacy Alimo and how many people deemed the tragedy of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 as a tragedy disconnected to the climate crisis that is happening. When it should’ve opened people’s eyes to the reality that more people are becoming victims of this climate crisis. “In a kind of anti-obituary in the weather section of the New York Times, victims of Hurricane Sandy are described as deindividualized bodies arrayed amid storm-fallen trees and flooded streets. This is news without the therapeutic structuring of the plot; the obituary denied the familiar arc of an individual life.” (Alimo 2) A climate crisis that has to do with us and what we put into the climate. When people refer to the climate crisis, people are not focusing on solutions; they are focusing on how to adjust to this new climate. This idea of adjusting is very interesting when considering that human beings are creatures of adjusting. LeMenager mentions sociologist Kari Norgad, who explains how the climate shifts throughout time are proof of humans ability to accept the reality of the climate in front of them.

Climate fiction is a genre that gives people an opportunity to see how climate directly affects groups of people. There’s many movies and books that build these worlds where humans have gone extinct and the effects this has on the climate. The Anthropocene relates to the impact humans specifically have on the climate. In Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence, he discusses this slow violence that affects the poor. “Both bioderegulation and slow violence ask us to think through environmental degradation, war, and even extinction without the irresponsible and self-indulgent excitement attached to narratives of the apocalypse.” (Rob Nixon 6)

Nixon’s Slow Violence compared to LeMenager’s Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre share this idea that these changes take time and small steps. This is a similar experience Nixon shares: “This wearing, structural violence has been carried out, over time, against the poor and the places in which they live through the diverse practices of colonialism, from fossil fuel extraction to territorial occupation to, again, economic globalization.” (Nixon 6) Climate change started small with no active repercussions initially. People adjust to these new climates without imagining what has happened to cause the different weather. Cli-fi has helped to give insight on a future that can possibly be ours if we don’t do anything about this climate crisis. The effects of this climate crisis are endless, and we shouldn’t want to do something when it’s too late.

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear Cli-Fi is disaster movies. Big blockbusters about humanity trying to survive some gargantuan ecological event, reshaping the world as we know it. As every year approaches, the earth is getting hotter and hotter, and it leaves us in this state of casual resignment to our inevitable destruction, the ‘everyday’ as LeManger puts it. Yet if one were to think about it for a second, the true existential threat that we all face is not some ‘other’, but ourselves. When I say “ourselves,”  I don’t mean it in the individual mode but as a whole species, for the very reason that the technological advances that allow me to type this to you, the infrastructure that allows me to post this on the internet, the market that allows things to be so ideologically chewed through the process of global trade that I don’t even know where the food I eat is coming from—all of it, the very world we have found ourselves situated in is the product of years of ecological transfiguration. Our systems actively that have made our lives so convenient and quick will ultimately be our downfall.

As Lemanger says, “Climate change represents, among other things, an assault on the everyday,” adding, “As Stacy Alaimo and other new materialist thinkers remind us, the environment is not an externality… the world lives inside of us, and we know it.” When examining cli-fi, this is precisely what is at play. Specifically in the disaster film, in all it’s monstruous spectacle, we see an eruption (sometimes literal) of the everyday. Take the 1996 classic Twister, which takes the everyday (i.e americana imagery and life) and inserts a environmental disruption, which like most these films is treated as antagonist. Most of the film is spent trying to defeat a literal tornado, and by the grace of 90’s screenwriters, our protagonist and his love interest survive the disaster and return to the everyday, presumably to return to normalcy. In disaster films, this is often how the stories go: some phenomenon or entity poses an existential threat to humanity; our characters endure and try to survive; through some ingenious means they survive and reverse the disaster; humanity survives.

We see in these films a neoliberal framing and, by extension, a borderer way by which Hollywood and the masses see the Anthropocene. Climate change is not a systematized, slow catastrophe but spectacles to be awed by and to face not with radical creative change but through triumph. The logic of neoliberal capitalism would much readily have us all move to Mars than to stop the flows of capital from siphoning the life out of literally everything. The disaster film reminds us of that true, if not tired, Fredric Jameson quote, “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence seems to couple with LeMenager’s Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre to serve as an explanation for the changes in everyday life that she notices in this new “era”, as she calls it, of life that cli-fi as a genre features. 

The “slow violence,” as Nixon calls it, that we are being subject to in the anthropocene is so structural and embedded in our lives that we can’t really get a grasp on the fact that it is even happening in any of its dimensions, which is what I think LeMenager’s emphasis on what defines a human daily habit is based on. The slow violence that Nixon describes seems almost omnipotent; it “needs to be seen–and deeply considered–as a contest not only over space, or bodies, or labor, or resources, but also over time” (Nixon 2361). And what is a human habit if not a temporal response to our space, bodies, and resources? However, climate change has really catalyzed the degrading effects of structural, slow, deeply embedded violence that “kill slowly by means of stress, sleep deprivation [and] anhedonia” and thus changed what it means to live “moment by moment” as a fragile human in the anthropocene (LeMenager). 

Nixon and LeMenager seem to agree that slow violence has absolutely redefined, if not crushed, what it means to be human, and the most clear manifestation of this can be examined by looking at the privileged class, and how their incrementally changing “habits” have effects on a global scale. We see this through the spread of technology, especially in the global north. Technology has modified our– “us” and “our” being the privileged class with access to such technology–means of thinking and processing from collective, aware, and perhaps “slow” to “continuous partial attention”. How I understand it is that we are so used to getting information immediately, skimming articles, looking at ten second videos on tiktok, writing paragraphs of texts on iMessage in seconds, that we do not have the attention span or commitment to anything that would take more time: reading a book, research, writing a letter, telling someone you appreciate them rather than double clicking to “like” their photo. The fast paced environment we live in conceals even further the slow violence we are contributing to, because it doesn’t match our style of life. In this way, we seem to be losing grip on reality–literally. We are having such a hard time defining and addressing slow violence because we can’t seem to grasp the grandiosity of the world. To connect this slow violence back to my point about habits, LeMenager defines habits as “the subjective practice of reality”. I think technology has warped our perception of reality and subjectivity. We live in our own worlds, our own curated feeds, and think everything is so personalized to us. Our minds now function in discrete bits, where my lack of awareness of geological time and space puts things like my skincare routine or my back to school outfit on the same level of importance as the election or animal extinction. If everything is all “the same”, tackling slow violence becomes even harder because we do not have a sense of connection to the outside world as it impacts humans and society as a whole vs how it impacts me and my immediate needs. As I’m typing this, it seems we have grown impulsive and childish. Climate change and its impacts on the world really shows us this in the way that we–as the privileged class in the global north–can seem to put the water crises and floods in Bangladesh or the garbage islands in the ocean in the back of our mind, until they start hitting us directly. Ultimately, slow violence prompts genres such as cli-fi that LeMenager discusses, of which the goal is to reconnect the world, create culture, and as she sweetly puts it: “to love”.