‘Wild Possibility’: American Literatures, Climate Change, and Hope in the Anthropocene: Part 1

This special issue of Comparative American Studies explores the literatures of the American hemisphere and their engagement with Anthropogenic climate change. The complex and contentious histories, geopolitics, and interrelated histories of colonial domination, oppression, dispossession, and dislocation of the American hemisphere have resulted in commonalities of experience among oppressed communities and cultures. In the twenty-first century, the historically uneven distribution of resources has resulted in a further commonality of experience: the environmental injustices and increasing inequalities emerging from the climate crisis and its uneven impacts. The twenty-first century has also witnessed a hemispheric boom in writing concerned with climate change which, we contend, represents a rich site for the ‘wild possibility’ of hope in times that can feel hopeless. These writings, while locally and culturally specific, speak across borders of all kinds to offer ways of thinking and acting in the face of climate crisis. This special issue of Comparative American Studies makes an important intervention into the field of climate and narrative, focusing not on dystopia and apocalypse but instead on hope. The literary texts explored in this special issue allow us to imagine a liveable future, where imagined possibilities become sites of social critique and potential transformations.