Introduction

As the climate crisis deepens and its effects continue to be experienced unevenly across the majority world, the globalgothic becomes entangled with ecological thought. In the past decade, diverse writers have been exploring climate futures through speculative genres in fiction. Common themes and modalities are emerging despite differences in geographical location and political context. This chapter identifies one common modality as animism, which is a relational concept of subjectivity and sociality derived from the beliefs and practices of indigenous people across the majority world. Animism is an ontology that insists that the world is alive and ‘that to be means to participate in this aliveness’ (Vetlesen 2019, 16). That is, animism necessitates a recognition of human embeddedness in a more-than-human world and, as such, offers a compelling means to think through the crisis of the Anthropocene towards modes of being-with that offer better futures for all life on the planet. Such a thought, however, is not utopian: it elicits a confrontation with what the philosopher Timothy Morton has called ‘dark ecology’, an ecological awareness that has much in common with what philosophers in the West identify as ‘uncanny’ because of its defamiliarising effects (Morton 2016, 26). It also confronts the vulnerability, suffering and damage that characterise life in the Anthropocene. Dark ecology, a gothicised discourse, tempers a straightforward appropriation of animism by the West as a utopian solution to the climate crisis. Indeed, the turn to animism already complicates the universalising assumptions behind the Western term ‘Anthropocene’, the name for a geological and historical epoch in which humans have altered planetary conditions, and one that suggests that all humanity is equally responsible for the ensuing crisis. As many critics have noted, such a designation elides the historical and ongoing effects of imperialism, capitalism and colonialism in creating climate change, as well as effacing the ways in which its effects tend to fall most severely on those communities least responsible (Moore 2016; Satgar 2018; Yusoff 2018). As Kathryn Yusoff argues, ‘imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence’ (2018, 12). In its alternative cosmologies, ontologies and epistemologies, animism reveals the violence inherent not only in these global systems that have driven climate change, but in the modes of thought in which they are grounded and through which they are justified and normalised (Vetlesen 2019, 72).