Hetero tempo rality and Posthumanism in Alternative Futurisms

The two most common critiques levelled against Anthropocene discourse are, first, that it projects a "one world" ideology that universalizes problematic notions of humanity and, second, that it reproduces a linear understanding of temporality by presenting the current moment as a cardinal point in our relation to the future.1 Since the Anthropocene is of course first and foremost a narrative of our place in time and in the world, it is unsurprising that the doublé critique leveled against this new scientific concept has been extended to climate fiction, a strand of contemporary literature that engages more or less directly with climate change. By dramatizing climatic change as a universal catastrophe happening in the (not so) distant future, and by often casting straight white men in the role of climate saviors, such narratives appear to suffer from similar flaws-pretense of homogeneous humanity, assumption of linear time-that have been associated with the Anthropocene concept as such. Stephanie LeMenager's discussion of the "woman problem" in climate fiction, or Matthew Schneider-Mayerson's argument that a lot of recent American climate fiction novels reproduce white Western privilege, to name just two examples, should be understood in light of these broader concerns about the futures emplotted by the Anthropocene concept (LeMenager; Schneider-Mayerson). While a number of scholars and intellectuals have argued that narrative art, and specifically realist fiction, is fundamentally unsuited to capture the long time scales of the Anthropocene (e.g., Ghosh; Clark), others have argued that the representational resources of genre fiction might be mobilized to reach a deeper understanding of our role as geomorphic agents in this new epoch. [...]responding to Amitav Ghosh's provocative statement that the traditional epic is better attuned to the Anthropocene than the modern novel with its human-scaled, character-driven plot lines, Ursula Heise has argued that science fiction displays a "modern epic impulse" that allows it to render the expanded temporal horizon of the Anthropocene in ways not possible in conventional realist fiction (Heise 300). While not all Afrofuturist fiction engages directly with global warming-Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993), which has been hailed as an example of pro to-climate fiction (Trexler), is a notable exception-the genre contributes to the broadening of future imaginaries in the Anthropocene by challenging the racist biases em