The Climate of Emergency and Global South Fiction: Critiquing the Absence of Emergency in the Anthropocene through Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé

Abstract

In the context of the Global South, the question of the climate crisis encounters a paradigm shift, where both capitalism and colonialism on the part of the Global North have sponsored and expedited the climate change and the associated socio-political crises which take a heavy toll on the once-colonized Global South. Following the question of climate change, environmentalists of the Global South suggest that “there is a distinct environmental epistemology and ethos associated with the citizens in the Third World” (Slovic et al. 2015,1). In view of the above context, this paper seeks to revisit the Caribbean author Rita Indiana’s novel La mucama de Omicunlé  (2015), translated into English as Tentacle (2018) by Achy Obejas, locating it in light of Heideggerian Notlosigkeit (Heidegger 2012, 402), or lack of the sense of emergency, to decipher how this text represents one of the many responses to the “emergency of the lack of emergency” in the Anthropocene. Situating this Caribbean Anthropocene fiction through the rubrics of Rob Nixon’s “slow violence” (2011, 2) and Ramachandra Guha and Juan Mertinez-Alier’s “environmentalism of the poor” (1997, 5), this paper will explore how the ‘emergency consciousness’ of the Global South has different ontological appeals. The hypothesis inspiring this paper is that Anthropocene emergency fictions from the Global South are additions to the “empire writes back” (Ashcroft et al. 1989) aesthetics, responding to the crises of global capitalism and colonialism.