*refreshments will be available at 2:30pm in 423 Morrill Hall

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American Studies Spring 2023 Colloquium - Ecofascism

Speaker: April Anson

Title: American Ecofascism: Glaciers, Whiteness, Genre

Abstract: Self-described ecofascists perpetrated three recent mass-murderers in Buffalo, N.Y., El Paso, Texas, and Christchurch, New Zealand. In documents released prior to their violences, each blamed the environmental crisis on “invaders,” imagining an impending white genocide as the inevitable fact of a climate changed future and then using that fantasy to justify violence in the present. The texts themselves are largely copy-paste plagiarisms pulled from a long intellectual tradition that uses environmental concern to justify racialized violence, or ecofascism. The murderers’ texts exemplify the ways, just as white supremacy is embedded in everyday infrastructures, so too, it is rooted in a suffocating, self-referential narrative tradition. This talk follows the term "ecofascism" from its contemporary embrace by today’s far right through its derogatory association with twentieth-century far-left movements. It traces the origin of ecofascism to before the Green Nazis, to a distinctly American white nature narrative that not only predates climate science but continues to define whiteness as the total horizon of possibility across the political spectrum. This literary tradition transforms the systems causing climate chaos into an inevitable, self-fulfilling prophecy that, ultimately, aims to suffocate us all.

Bio: Dr. April Anson is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University, core faculty for the Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs, and affiliate faculty in American Indian Studies. Her research explores the historical and ongoing connections between climate change and white supremacy—and the Indigenous environmental justice traditions that eclipse those relations. She is the co-founder of the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative, co-author of Against the Ecofascist Creep, and was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has appeared in boundary 2, Resilience, Environmental History, Western American Literature, and others. In all, she remains committed to anti-racist and anti-colonial knowledge production and social movements.