What is it about?
In a comparison of the 2016–17 Malheur occupation and the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock, this essay parses apocalyptic storytelling for problematic pivots around an emergency event. It argues that apocalyptic stories of single disastrous moments shelter the settler state of emergency, protecting the logic of the settler colonial capitalism’s continuous creation of and dependence upon the emergency event.
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Photo by Jolanda Kirpensteijn on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This comparison clarifies the master metaphor lurking in the apocalyptic state of emergency—the ways apocalyptic emergency appeals reinforce the exclusionary violence and ecological devastation they so often seek to diagnose and disrupt.
Perspectives
Ultimately, I offer the exigency of an event-versus-structure distinction in apocalyptic environmental storytelling. Following Indigenous and Black feminist futurisms’ invocations of apocalypse, which indict the structure of the settler state(s) of emergency, I suggest that stories that both summon and see beyond the structures of settler colonial capitalism’s past, present, and future ends of worlds constitute a state of emergence for an antiracist politics of storytelling in the context of climate change.
April Anson
San Diego State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: "Master Metaphor": Environmental Apocalypse and the Settler States of Emergency, Resilience A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, January 2020, Project Muse,
DOI: 10.1353/res.2020.0037.
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