Climate justice is a term used for framing global warming and its manifold consequences as not only an environmental issue but also as involving ethical and political questions. In this chapter, I examine the usefulness of imaginative literatures from the Global South that focus on climate catastrophes and analyse them to probe the ways in which they add value. My central argument is undergirded by the idea that to achieve climate justice, it is necessary to involve disenfranchised groups in the policy-making process, for which imaginative literatures emerging from situated locations that give voice to their troubles become most pertinent.

Through an analysis of the mnemonic activities of three leading civil society organizations – Baladna, ADRID, and Badil – Chapter 4 examines two collective mnemonic Nakba practices established in the wake of the Oslo Accords inside Israel and the West Bank: annual Nakba Day commemoration and collective returns to former Palestinian villages. By detailing the mnemonic symbolism and political goals of these commemorative activities, this chapter illustrates that the established forms of Nakba commemoration in the post-Oslo period articulate the urgent desire to further awareness of the Nakba among younger generations with the specific aim of encouraging the continuing struggle for the right of return (Arabic: haq al-ʻawdah). With reference to the organizations’ varying social and geographical focuses, this chapter also attests to the fact that Nakba mnemonics seek to resist ongoing marginalization while reflecting Palestinian communities’ contemporary political, economic, and cultural grievances and diverging historical mnemonic traditions. The theoretical focus on the confrontational and defensive nature of Nakba mnemonic practices does not denote that the exclusionary narrative unfolds overtly. The analyzed commemorative acts are not “sites” of a narrative collision. Nevertheless, the societal invocation of the Nakba as a “present continuous” – or an “ongoing Nakba” – does shed light on existing trends of marginalization discussed throughout the work, which hinge on a retaliatory screening out of any past suffering of the out-group.

Chapter 7 describes some of chemists’ strategies of resistance to totalitarianism and the co-construction of new, intermediate spaces. Going backwards chronologically, it explores the liberal ethos of the Spanish chemical community in exile after the Civil War and the way in which it evolved in the Latin American context in particular. It also highlights some chemists’ attempts to protect liberal values in the chemical industry, in the universities and in the public sphere in hostile, anti-liberal contexts such as Franco’s dictatorship, as well as how some of them survived as internal refugees. The exiled Latin American chemical community protected Republican values of internationalism and pacifism and combined them with a liberal, flexible relationship (in economic terms) with private chemical firms, but also frequent commitments in favour of public companies (oil, hormones and the extraction of natural products). Inside Spain, some chemists set their own limits of academic power and constructed their own shelters in the press and in their collaboration with private companies. Following the university crisis of the 1960s, and in spite of the official optimism about economic growth, some chemical shelters had begun to challenge the values of the dictatorship, which formally ended after Franco’s death on 20 November 1975.