Mat Johnson’s Pym and Reflecting Whiteness in the Anthropocene

Abstract

As critics begin to construct a literary and cultural archive of the Anthropocene, I argue that this archive must include works that demonstrate the epoch’s White supremacist and settler colonial roots in addition to focusing on geologic stratigraphy and altered atmospheric conditions. I read Mat Johnson’s novel, Pym (2011), as an exemplar text of an expanded Anthropocene archive. Through its narrative form and use of genre, Pym makes visible how racial ideologies in Euro-centric forms of environmental representation actively produce an altered atmosphere by way of ignoring the effects of anti-Black racism and settler colonialism. Throughout the novel, Johnson weaves together African American cultural traditions with complex allegories of climate change and the Anthropocene, showing that the so-called world made by humans signaled by the name ‘Anthropocene’ is much more precisely what philosopher George Yancy calls a ‘white world making.’To trouble the ideological power of ‘the Anthropocene,’ I engage the climate science concept of the ‘Albedo effect,’ arguing that the Anthropocene—as both a narrative concept and a physical reality—figures as a metaphorical inversion of the Albedo effect. In climate science, the Albedo effect refers to the whiteness of a surface and its attendant capacity to reflect solar radiation, thereby preventing the solar radiation from being absorbed by the land, air and sea. Albedo is Latin for ‘whiteness,’ and more whiteness means less warming. I argue that the Anthropocene exhibits an inversion of this reflective process: in the Anthropocene, what is reflected is Whiteness, not as a color, but as a racial and settler colonial strategy.