Predatory Optimism: Earthquake and Elsewhere Catastrophe

Abstract: This essay explores a predatory variant of optimism rooted in the assumption that catastrophe must be elsewhere. Engaging literary, philosophical, and scientific texts from the Enlightenment to the present—including N. K. Jemisin's speculative fiction—the essay focuses on earthquakes as both literal and metaphorical ruptures that exemplify elsewhere catastrophe: a centuries-long cultural imagination of catastrophe that culminates in a particular US national delusion of immunity to disaster.