Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Climate change presents an extraordinary ethical challenge for artists. As an inner-city Australian writer, I experience very few of the deleterious effects of increased climate turmoil. The same cannot be said of citizens in countries like the Maldives, a country only one metre above sea level, which faces an existential threat from rising oceans. Australia is the world’s second largest exporter of coal and therefore bears an added burden of responsibility for the disaster. Given this, can artists in countries like Australia properly respond to the threat presented by climate change without engaging with populations who face the gravest danger? When working in the genre of climate fiction, are we ethically bound to write about these countries? Problems arise, of course, when crossing cultural boundaries in our fiction. Our attempts to imagine the lives of others are not always going to result in useful or insightful work. Concern over what Zadie Smith has called ‘getting it wrong’ rightfully holds us back. However, using Marcia Langton’s concept of the ‘intersubjective exchange,’ I argue that ‘getting it wrong’ is an essential step on the road to better understanding. For artists working in this area, it is useful to consider our representations as part of a process of dialogue across cultures. It may be that climate change is forcing us to overcome our discomfort in engaging across cultural boundaries.