Vanderbilt Professor: Climate Change Stories ‘Cater To The White Consciousness’
‘Texts that actually just reify whiteness’
Image Credit: Vanderbilt University
By Dave Huber, Associate Editor of The College Fix –
A professor of English at Vanderbilt University recently gave a talk about how the genre of climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” has a problem with “its intersection [of] race and genre.”
Teresa Goddu, whose advocacy led to the creation of Vanderbilt’s Environmental and Sustainability Studies minor, told an audience at the Novel Seminar Series that climate fiction in the United States “depicts the climate crisis as a whiteness crisis,” The Hustler reports.
Such stories “often represent white, mostly privileged characters in communities becoming destabilized if not undone by climate catastrophe,” Goddu said. “Climate punctures the bubble of safety and security that cocoons the white psyche.”
Goddu added that she is “tired” of the focus on whiteness in climate stories, or “texts that actually just reify whiteness.” As a result, she’s working on “encompassing slave and neo-slave narratives” into such tales to “expand the canon.”
“I really think a lot of climate fiction is being written, but not recognized as such, especially African American literature,” Goddu said. “I want to expand […] what is considered climate fiction and [redefine] what we are actually reading and paying attention to.”
Looking ahead, Goddu said she hopes her work will expand the genre and leverage optimism, satire and new tropes to innovate the body of work and reimagine a better, more sustainable future.
“I am more interested in reading stories that reimagine possible futures or teach me about the structures, historically and currently, that I live within,” Goddu said. “I don’t like literature as policy statements. I don’t like literature to be so instrumental.”
According to her faculty bio, Goddu’s research deals with “slavery and antislavery, race and American culture [and] genre studies.” In a 2021 interview, Goddu said she began “noticing how the antislavery movement was being invoked by climate activists as a model.”
“This led me to consider what social change my own moment demanded of me and how I might bring my gifts—as administrator, teacher, and writer—to bear on the issue,” she said. “It made sense to connect my long-standing concern with racial justice to the issue of climate justice and my interest in how literature can affect social change to the climate crisis.”
Seven years ago another Vanderbilt academic, Ed Rubin, offered a pair of courses on cli-fi: “Visions of the Future in Cli-Fi” and “Climate Change Literature: A New Fictional Genre about a Real Problem.” Many of the titles on his reading list (“Earth Abides,” “The Postman,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) are Euro/white-centric.
*Note: Article Republished on The Tennessee Conservative by express permission from The College Fix.
The idea that ppl can change the cycle of weather is hilarious to me.
Climate ie., weather changes constantly, regardless of ppl.
What we can change is pollution.
How about getting the countries that deposit trash in their rivers that flow to the oceans to use containers instead.
Voila! Cleaner oceans.
C02 is required for plant life and ppl to survive.
You separate your trash into 2,3 or even 4 containers for collection, well guess what most of it goes to the same dump.
And requires 2,3 or 4 different trucks to pick it up.
And all of them smell like garbage!
The REAL ‘cli-fi’ is your ‘job’, Teresa Goddu, at the all woke and mostly fictional university called Vanderbilt University, who’s namesake would turnover in his grave if he knew these type people are actually being paid to spew their fiction into the mush minds of some of the white-est and wealthiest of students in America. How ironic and shameful.
One of the poster children of the debacle “our” ejikashun “program” is.
Climate change is a front for Communism. Green Cross International is an environmental group founded by Mikla Gorbachov, so it is no surprise to see this scam being used on college campuses. Creating crisis after crisis makes for easier placement of fear and for communism to be the solution.
I find interesting that the people who push for the environment also push for people to move to the city instead of the country side amongst more nature. Cant control the masses if not concentration in a central location.
Keep your kids out of college, if you cant, then find colleges with God based values. FYI no college in Nashville has Gods Values.
Goddu says, “I don’t like literature as policy statements. I don’t like literature to be so instrumental.”
But then she decided to “bring my gifts—as administrator, teacher, and writer—to bear on the issue,,,(that’d be policy, Dear!) and connect my long-standing concern with racial justice to the issue of climate justice and my interest in how literature can affect social change to the climate crisis.”
We hope she enjoys her “gifts” for their own sake because she isn’t going to be able to give this stuff away.
But if reality intruding into smug, comopolitan, upscale space is the issue, check out the Supernova Rave Music Festival 3.1 miles from militarized Gaza border, the first Brazillian Parellel Universe psy-trance dance to held in Isreal,,,or a comabt zone, for that matter.
It’s even worse than when BLM invaded upscale, “defund the police” neighborhoods! Well, “not all th epolice”, as it turns out.
Or “Burning Man” mud flood in Nevada this September. Apparenlty, climate activists don’t check weather reports.
But if fossil fuels are really the concern, then I’d say that we’ll need lots of slaves again.
On 911, we were to go shopping, Bush said.. Not all Muslims are like that. It’s a religion of peace.
Oh, but now, it’s “KIll them All! Let God sort them out!” But that’s when it hits their own.