More Than Rising Water: Representing Climate Change and Urban Transformation in Bangkok Wakes to Rain

Abstract

Climate change is a phenomenon of immense and disorienting complexity which challenges the imagination and complicates its representation in literature. Many critics have pointed out the dominance of universalist and anthropocentric crisis narratives in climate fiction, which focus on imagined future events in North America or Europe and understand climate change as a unique and unprecedented event. In contrast, recent publications by postcolonial, indigenous, and diasporic writers illustrate how global power relations inform past, present and future environmental crises and work to reveal the manifold interrelations between humans, nonhumans and the material world. Such works reveal how climate change interacts with other social and environmental justice matters and contribute to a cross-pollination of climate fiction beyond a Western-centric imagination. This article discusses Pitchaya Sudbathad's 2019 novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain as an example of contemporary global Anglophone climate fiction which highlights the coexistence of heterogeneous experiences of climate change. While the novel exhibits some features that are commonly found in Anglophone climate fiction, its complex form and narrative structure create a sense of the socially stratified nature and the omnipresence of environmental and urban transformation, which is often absent in Western crisis narratives. The novel illustrates the entangled nature of social, political and ecological concerns and rejects the totalising pretence of undifferentiated human victimhood in the face of climate change by drawing attention to a plurality of human and more-than-human realities.