A New Geological (R)age: Orogeny, Anger, and the Anthropocene in N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In The Fifth Season (2015), N.K. Jemisin depicts speculative seismological and volcanic events to defamiliarize the outcomes of slavery from their American instantiations, making them starkly visible again and again. I argue that analyzing how The Fifth Season articulates this understanding requires a geological or, more precisely, a tectonic lens. In this paper I focus on The Fifth Season specifically for its tripartite narrative stratification, which reproduces the geological mechanisms of building and destroying mountains in the space of a human lifetime. Jemisin uses volcanos, tectonic plates, slip strikes, and especially earthquakes to parallel, echo, amplify, and foreshadow her characters’ responses and actions. This is a tectonic tactic, not only for negotiating the violent ruptures of the novel’s ironically named world of “The Stillness” but also for tracing slavery’s historical arc, requiring multifaceted transnational analyses across centuries to track its devastating trajectories.