The Poetics of Denial: Epistemic Politics and the Climate Stereotype on Tangier Island, USA

Abstract This article examines the semiotics of epistemic politics surrounding climate change denial on Tangier Island, Virginia, a shrinking inhabited island in the Chesapeake Bay, USA. Using long-term ethnographic field research, the paper analyzes how islanders’ professed disbelief in climate change functions not as ignorance but as political and poetic positioning. Denial is treated as a symbolic act, not reducible to misinformation or scientific illiteracy, but shaped by classed and embodied relations with state knowledge regimes, media discourses, and environmental governance. Drawing on Peirce’s pragmatism and Jakobson’s poetics, the article frames climate denial as both an imposed stereotype from without and an identification strategy from within, connected to multiply indexed relationships. To that end, the article advances a semiotic approach to climate politics that centers affect, professed belief (creed) and epistemic stratification.