Thinking the end of this planet is easier than thinking the end of settler colonialism: Jens Temmen, ‘Scorched Earth: Discourses of Multiplanetarity, Climate Change, and Martian Terraforming in Finch and Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars’, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 2022 | settler colonial studies blog

Thinking the end of this planet is easier than thinking the end of settler colonialism: Jens Temmen, ‘Scorched Earth: Discourses of Multiplanetarity, Climate Change, and Martian Terraforming in Finch and Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars’, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 2022

30Jul22

Abstract: This contribution discusses the current surge of Mars colonization narratives both in science and culture, and the ways these narratives are received and circulated in current ecocritical debates on a multiplanetary future of humanity. This analysis in this contribution takes its cue from the representation of the California wildfires of 2020 as an anthropogenic spectacle that is foreboding of a post-apocalyptic future in which Earth becomes Mars-like, and discusses how this discourse is reproduced in the Hollywood movie Finch and Kate Greene’s popular science memoir Once Upon A Time I Lived on Mars. As texts of quasi-science communication, they produce a contact zone between Earth/Mars which serves to legitimize technoliberal fantasies of terraforming Mars into Earth as a solution to climate change. With all paths to all possible futures of human habitation – utopian or dystopian – allegedly leading right through the Red Planet, there is an urgency to critically engage with the idea of planetarity being overwritten by a discourse of multiplanetarity that veils the continuity of extractivist capitalism/colonialism in a narrative of futurity and progress.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

%d bloggers like this: