Trails of Erasure: imagining the reality of co-migrations in contemporary climate fiction

ABSTRACT

In this article, I am going to trace ‘trails of erasure’ in two contemporary novels that introduce a wider trend in climate fiction: Firstly, both Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012) and Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations (2020) indicate a tendency to envision temporalities that render climate threats more imminent and, secondly, both novels imagine spatialities that align human and non-human forms of migration. Thus, they closely connect human and non-human ways of coping with climate change, which may be considered a form of deep adaptation to our current climate crisis. However, they not only challenge but also reinscribe problematic gender and class discourses in the process.

KEYWORDS:

• Deep adaptation
• biodiversity
• intersectional ecocriticism
• solastalgia
• speciestalgia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As the Arctic tern becomes increasingly endangered, it comes under heightened scientific scrutiny but also gains symbolic significance in literature and culture more generally. 2020 seems to have been the unofficial year of the Arctic tern: The bird features on the cover of the February edition of the Journal of Avian Biology and the Arctic tern is discussed in a 2020 special issue of the International Journal of Avian Science. Fiona Burns’s empirical report on The State of the UK’s Birds published in 2020 documents the decrease in bird populations from the 1980s to 2018; while the long-term trend shows a general decrease of 11%, the decrease in some places today, the Shetlands for example, already amounts to roughly 90%.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nadine Boehm-Schnitker

Nadine Boehm-Schnitker serves as a senior lecturer (‘Privatdozentin’) for English Studies: Literature and Culture at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg.