Reading Beyond the Anthropocene: Indispensability as Environmental Justice in N.K. Jemisin’s <i>Emergency Skin</i>

Abstract N.K. Jemisin’s science fiction novelette Emergency Skin (2019) narrates a collective future built on the indispensability of historically marginalized communities. I interpret Emergency Skin’sinsistence on indispensability as the more generative inverse of the species-level framing of the concept of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene-thinking can erase and obscure human hierarchies and power dynamics, such as those based on race, class, and colonization. Instead, I employ indispensability, one of David Pellow’s pillars of critical environmental justice studies, as a framework to analyze how Emergency Skin uses second person perspective to foster a counterhegemonic reading practice, provokes an environmental justice approach to human skin, and offers a worldbuilding strategy in response to ecological and social crisis.