Genre Flailing and the Contemporary Climate Migration Novel

This chapter explores the rupture between contemporary Anglophone fiction about ‘climate migration’ and a longer tradition of migration literature. Since the 1990s, non-governmental agencies have speculated that population displacement will be the preeminent societal consequence of anthropogenic climate change. Climate migration thus poses distinct challenges for literary fiction: it is at once an ongoing (if unequally distributed) reality for a portion of the planet today as well as the probable condition for the rest of the globe in the future. The representational and ethical considerations implied in this subject produce narratives that experiment with form and genre in the pursuit of new ways of seeing the world, a gesture that Lauren Berlant terms the genre flail. By calling attention to the genre flailing in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), this chapter foregrounds their mutual efforts to refresh climate migration narratives and reject the reductive universalism embedded in prominent literary predecessors, such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). By identifying this rupture, this chapter provides a critical framework for evaluating formal and thematic continuities and discontinuities among some of the most prominent contemporary climate migration novels.