Anthropocene Storytelling: Extinction, D/Evolution, and Posthuman Ethics in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan

Abstract

The eco-apocalyptic novel is arguably one of the most popular contemporary genres, evidenced by the quantity of literary publications preoccupied with climate change and the viability of species and planetary survival in the age of the Anthropocene (LeMenager 221–22). Literary critic James Berger observes that apocalypse primarily speaks to fears concerning human survival, typically represented by “biological-cultural forms” of human sterility directly linked to environmental collapse; in other words, the “end of [human] procreation” is equated with the end of the “natural” world (132–34). Ecoapocalyptic fictions thus often expose anthropocentric assumptions manifested by Anthropocene narratives that are invested in “perpetuating a human/nature binary” (DeLoughrey 353). Feminist new materialisms and queer ecologies generally resist the dominant Anthropocene narrative in its premise “that the era of nature is over,” or, that there has ever been “a coherent concept” of what is considered “natural” (Hannah 199). Rather, from a posthuman perspective, the concept of the Anthropocene should provoke an understanding that the “human” has in fact never been outside “nature” and that there is no origin point of return, where “nature” is pure or untouched by anthropogenic manipulations (199–200). In a broad summation of their corresponding arguments, feminist new materialists demand a radical shift in perspective that operates from the premise that humans are not separate from but entangled with multiple human and nonhuman “others,” which would in turn disrupt the centrality of humans within Anthropocene discourses (Barad 178–79, 396; Bennett 13, 107; Frost 3). Furthermore, many critics point out that the “anthropo” of the Anthropocene needs to be untangled from its presumption of a universalized