Care and Liberation in the Black Anthropocenes: apocalypse, justice and family abolition in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy and Cherie Dimaline’s Marrow Thieves series
LUCIO DE CAPITANI
Abstract
Cherie Dimaline’s Marrow Thieves series (2017-2021) and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017) are examples of speculative fiction that interweave post-apocalyptic settings with issues of racial, social and climate (in)justice. Dimaline’s work is a Young Adult dystopian series in which the Indigenous people of Canada are hunted for their bone marrow, which is employed to cure settlers from a madness-inducing incapacity to dream, resulting from the effects of climate collapse and capitalism. Jemisin’s novels are a speculative fiction series set in a world besieged by earthquakes, whose planetary predicament is connected to the ongoing oppression of marginalized groups. Both writers explore worlds in which the vulnerability of oppressed racialized people is inseparable from a proximity with, and an intimacy with, ecological devastation, staging speculative versions of what Kathryn Yusoff has called, in reference to real-world contexts, Black Anthropocenes. Since both series connect the project of ending the Black Anthropocenes with kinship and family, while being fully aware that kinship/familial formations can either be revolutionary or reinforcing systems of oppression, I read both through the concept of family abolition, understood as finding alternatives to the hegemonic institution of the family while dismantling the hierarchies, systems and uneven power relations it helps to defend. Relying on family-abolitionists like Sophie Lewis, Brigitte Vassallo and others, I explore, through Jemisin, how relations of care, liberation and autonomy can be revolutionary antidotes to kinship relations of ownership; and, through Dimaline, how the nuclear family (and the nation) entails a logic of sacrificial otherness.
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N. K. Jemisin, Cherie Dimaline, family abolition, Black Anthropocenes, kinship, apocalypse
Pages
63-77