숙명인문학연구소 HK+ 사업단 연구진은 <혐오시대, 인문학의 대응> 아젠다 연구 사업을 수행하며, 학술 연구 논문을 국내외 전문 학술지에 출간하고 있다.
분류
논문
학술지 구분
우수등재지
저서명
The Politics of Death and Disease in Climate Crisis Narratives: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future
저자
김경옥
참여구분
단독저자
저자 수
1
학술지명
영어영문학
발행처
한국영어영문학회
게재일
2025.09
본문(링크)
초록
This study analyzes Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) as a work of climate fiction that interrogates the politics of life and death in the era of climate crisis. While many climate narratives remain tied to an anthropocentric perspective, The Ministry for the Future depicts heat waves, pandemics, migration, and ecological collapse as outcomes of the structural inequalities embedded in global capitalism and environmental governance. In doing so, it shows that climate disasters are not merely natural events but socially mediated phenomena that intensify existing injustices. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and biopower, Giorgio Agamben’s thanatopolitics, and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, the study examines how the novel exposes the mechanisms through which climate governance selectively protects some lives while abandoning others. It highlights how climate-induced catastrophes such as deadly heat waves or floods disproportionately affect vulnerable nations and marginalized groups, thereby widening the divide between the Global North and South. The analysis also employs posthumanist frameworks—including Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman ethics, and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory—to show how Robinson dismantles anthropocentrism by granting narrative agency to nonhuman entities such as animals, ecosystems, and even the climate system. By foregrounding these more-than-human perspectives, the novel points toward an ethic of multispecies coexistence. Ultimately, this research argues that The Ministry for the Future operates as a literary experiment that critiques the socio-structural causes of death and disease, exposes the biopolitical violence of the climate crisis, and imagines a posthuman ethic for planetary survival.
