climate
When In These Times launched in early 2017, it gave voice to a collective sense of shock, a need to connect scholarship with activism and “engage, engage, engage.” Since then, contributors have offered a range of thoughtful reflections on how to study and teach modernism and modernity in these catastrophic times. But until recently the forum has been unsettlingly silent on the climate crisis—even as temperatures and sea levels continue to rise, record-breaking floods and wildfires proliferate, droughts threaten crops and ecosystems, glaciers continue to melt and coral reefs to bleach, and a million animal and plant species face extinction at heartbreakingly accelerated rates.
What would it mean to reread Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) as a narrative about the representation of Black migrants during the smog? The smog, the 1950s’ concerning ecological and climate issue, results from the mix of coal-burning smoke with London fog. Upon combustion, coal emits visible black smoke into the lingering fog, causing various health and respiratory hazards. The Lonely Londoners depicts the 1950s, when the Windrush generation of migrants, particularly Black Afro-Caribbeans, arrive in London during the smog and, at the same time, encounter growing racial and anti-immigrant sentiments. A close reading of the novel reveals a running analogy between black smoke and Black migrants as Selvon excavates the parallel of air pollution and racism. The analogy underwrites the assumption that the blackness of the smog is toxic, and in the popular imagination, Black immigrants presumably “pollute” England. In this essay, I will argue that The Lonely Londoners astutely places racialization and pollution as figures and