Life after growth: racialised foreclosure in post-Katrina climate fiction

Growth has become a hot-button issue in critical conversations about geopolitical economy and ecology since the 2008 financial crisis. But what if the era of economic growth is over? If this provocation were true, economic and ecological crises would converge less on the problem of growth than its foreclosure, a concept that links the 2008 credit crunch, long term economic stagnation, and planetary climate catastrophe. And each of these entangled forms of foreclosure has a racialised subject at its centre: the subprime debtor, the salvage picker, and the climate refugee. This essay explores the representation of racialised foreclosure in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). In these climate fiction narratives, scarcities of wage work and housing meet ecological ruin at the end of growth, and the racialised figures of the subprime debtor, the salvage picker, and the climate refugee collapse into a singular subject of foreclosure. Drawing on the anti-social turn in queer theory and its critique in queer of colour feminism to ask what life might look like after growth, this essay rethinks the relation between reproduction and futurity through the figure of the racialised child.