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Drawing on an emerging archive of climate justice cultural production, I ask, what does non-naïve radical hope look like now in the face of interconnected environmental, political and social disasters? What does freedom look like in the face of environmental and state violence in its myriad forms- gentrification, surveillance, policing and deportation regimes? Culture and media, in abolitionist climate justice narratives, offer a partial answer. I argue that these narratives, grounded squarely within social movements, enact an imaginative reclamation and recognition in a brutalizing economic and political system that seeks to deny the rights of survival for vulnerable peoples and communities, animals and the ecosystems.
Julie Sze is Professor of American Studies at UC Davis.