Agnethe Brounbjerg Bennedsgaard

My PhD project is placed in the intersection of unevenly distributed climate crisis, speculative fiction and feminist theory. My project investigates how new narrative structures arise in the face of climate breakdown, by looking at a wave of contemporary translated genrehybrid climate literature from Latin America and East Asia. My claim is that of these narratives utilize uncomfortable, negative affects, such as alienation, to create a more complex understanding of the often overlooked consequences of the climate crisis.

I also study how these books employ a novel combination of speculative genre conventions such as the gothic, horror and weird, as a response to a world on the verge of breakdown. I aim to show how these narratives position oppressive frameworks of capitalism, sexism and colonialism are the driving forces of the climate breakdown, hereby showing how the consequences of the crisis are felt unequally across the planet. Through the project I’m developing a method,  planetary comparativism which reads books outside of their national frameworks and onto a planetary scale, allowing for juxtapositions and surprising connections. I also research on the contemporary conditions of translated fiction on the Anglophone book market, including social media.