Learning response-ability: What The Broken Earth can teach about crafting a Chthulucene

Abstract

In this article, N.K. Jemisin’s multiple-Hugo-award-winning trilogy The Broken Earth (2015–2017) is read with Sylvia Wynter’s genealogy of who counts as human, and Donna Haraway’s conception of the Chthulucene, a spatiotemporal location in which all beings are interconnected with each other. The article argues that understanding similarities between how humanity is constructed by framing the white Man as Human and everyone else as Other on our own Earth; and humans without superpowers as Human and those with superpowers as Other on the apocalyptic Earth of the trilogy, we can more fully understand the consequences of relegating people to less-than-human status. It further argues that if education is the problem that perpetuates the Human/Other binary, education can also be a solution to ending that binary, and can make space for different ways of thinking and relating to each other, which can create a better world. The educations given and received by characters in the trilogy offer an example of creating a Chthulucene, even though the consequences of these educations include death and difficulties, The Broken Earth offers hope for learning to move away from the world as it is, to a world that might be.