The Ethics of Care in Latin American and Caribbean Climate Fiction
The Researchers
Fabienne VialaLink opens in a new window is a Professor in Hispanic and Caribbean Studies at the 天美传媒. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Universit茅 Paris3 Sorbonne Nouvelle (2004). She recently published: 鈥淚ntersections of Memory and Sustainability in the Caribbean Cyberpunk Imagination鈥� (Journal of Romance Studies, Special Issue num. 25 Entanglements of Memory and Sustainability, University of Liverpool Press, May 2025) and 鈥淛ustice Making and the Performance of Memory in the French Caribbean鈥� (in The Routledge Handbook for Caribbean Studies, Ed. Pat Noxolo, Kevon Rhiney, Ronald Cummings, Taylor and Francis: London, 2025). Professor Viala also co-authored and co-directed the film short "SOS-System of Systems: A Visual Caribbean Tale of Erosion" which premiered at the IMPACTe International Film Festival of Barcelona in May 2023. Her expertise in comparative literary and cultural analysis include the publication of five monographs on the works of Marguerite Yourcenar, Alejo Carpentier, Didier Daeninckx, Manuel V谩squez Montalban and Leonardo Padura. Her last monograph, The Post-Colombus Syndrome (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) analysed the multiple and ambivalent representations of Christopher Columbus in the contemporary French, Hispanic and Anglophone Caribbean collective imagination, in the light of Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant, Fernando Ortiz and Antonio Benitez Rojo鈥檚 theories of transculturation.
The Challenge
The project investigates the role of Latin American and Caribbean contemporary literature in the advancement of global justice and environmental awareness by rendering visible the Hispanophone and Francophone contribution to the genre of ecofiction. Current empirical studies analyse the social impact of climate fiction (Schneider-Mayerson, 2023) and largely anglophone Anthropocene novels (Trexler, 2015), which fictionalise ecological issues to promote a sense of accountability towards the environment. In contrast, the 鈥榚thics of care鈥� novels in this study represent a departure from the commonly accepted view that climate fiction鈥檚 principal aim is to alert readers about what global extinction might look like. In the corpus of analysis, irreparable environmental damage represents the consequences of the economy of exhaustion responsible for the sixth mass extinction on Planet Earth (Verg猫s, 2019), but only to facilitate the emergence of life-sustaining regimes of care: solidarity, parenting, empathy, grief and gratitude. Grounded in hope, interconnected vulnerabilities, and spiritual values, those regimes participate to a set of principles and actions - an ethics of care - that challenge the preoccupations of our thermo-industrial civilisation and promote justice across men and women of diverse racial, cultural, and class heritages, but also other-than-human forms of life.
Our Approach
The monograph鈥檚 major contribution to the field of environmental literatures and cultures lies in its argument that the representation of ecological collapse in the non-anglophone climate fiction of the Americas diverges from the eco-dystopian tropes prominent in Northern American and European literature, because it enables an ethics of care: bottom-up mechanisms set in place by the dispossessed to maintain life and hope when things seem beyond repair, including demonstrations of kindness, respect and consideration towards people, animals and nature in pain, in agony or already dead. The analysis is concerned with the region鈥檚 long history of resilience against slavery and extractivism, causing Black and Indigenous people of the Americas to experience epochs of extinction for the last five hundred years for which they have developed narratives of rebirth within a world vision that connects never-ending cycles of life and death. The novels analysed were published since 2010 when the deadly earthquake of Haiti coincided with the establishment of climate fiction as a literary genre, in countries where climate tipping points have already been reached. Rather than imagining the dystopias that might emerge in times of environmental collapse, the stories engage with care when the worst has already happened, as a set of principles that govern physical behaviours and affective aptitudes that aim at protecting life against discriminations of species, class, gender and race, inherited from colonialism and slavery.
Our Impact
Professor Viala's methodology places in dialogue responses that have been separated by linguistic divisions, thus proposing a unique corpus of research: 17 novels written by authors from the Hispanic and Francophone Americas asking how is the future of Planet Earth is variously imagined in countries that share a history of slavery and ecocide initiated by the predatory ideology of colonisation in the Americas (Swampa, 2019). The project brings into dialogue contemporary ecofiction from post-plantation islands shaped by anti-slavery systems of belief (Haiti, Martinique, Cuba, Dominican Republic) and imaginaries from continental South America, where neo-extractivism has intensified the disputes with indigenous people over the use of natural resources (Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay). In those countries, ecosystemic extinctions are graspable in the everyday life of the people and ecological disasters have caused mass migration and forced degrowth in the 21st century, which have inspired writers to envisage extinction anxiety as an empowering affect able to challenge our understanding of the meaning of care as a responsibility to continue and repair. Whether or not they live in their native countries, the authors I study imagine stories mirroring their region鈥檚 accelerated exposure to a polycrisis which is currently happening and not only feared. Therefore, their stories respond to the need to think about the future on an increasingly uninhabitable land by reclaiming past precolonial heritages, and by adopting a broader longue dur茅e perspective that can view the Anthropocene from below, through the eyes of the poor, the dispossessed or the dead. The study examines the conditions that govern the ways in which particular types of care emerge, such as solidarity, parenting, empathy, grief and gratitude, rendering visible the specific context within which the genre of ecofiction developed in the Southern Cone and in the Caribbean, including the strong tradition of science-fiction in anticapitalist countries, particularly during the Cold War, alongside which contemporary authors have been imagining stories from the future that transform terror in the present into responsiveness to care and grieving practices inherited from the past.
