Other of Climate Change Racial Futurism, Migration, Humanism
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Biographical note
Andrew Baldwin is associate professor of human geography at Durham University. He is the co-editor of Life Adrift: Climate Change, Migration, Critique and Climate Change, Migration and Human Rights: Law and Policy Perspectives.If you think that the climate migrant/refugee is a real thing, think again. Andrew Baldwin rattles our assumptions about global climate change, convincingly demonstrating that the idea of climate migration had to be invented to save white humanism, while protecting the West from the future threat of the non-white migrant. The Other of Climate Change is a brilliant, elegantly written, and much-needed critical reflection on the racial underpinnings of our climate crisis.
- Ilan Kapoor, professor of Critical Development Studies, York University, Canada,
The climate refugee, forced to flee the South in the wake of climate change, is a phantom and a racialized one to boot. As this book powerfully argues, such a phantom upholds white supremacy and racial capitalism by drawing us into a narrative about white saviors who will save the earth and the hapless Indigenous, Brown, and Black peoples trapped in apocalyptic scenarios of a rapidly deteriorating planet. Key to the fantasy is the innocent European, imagined only as the force of good and never the source of the catastrophe in the first place. We should beware of the racialized phantoms of climate change who populate U.N. reports and political discourses. The simple storyline they peddle, that climate change causes migration, keeps us from confronting the true nature of the crisis we face, the annihilative heart of racial capitalism and the devastation it endlessly wreaks.
- Sherene H. Razack, distinguished professor and Penny Kanner endowed chair, Gender Studies, University of California at Los Angeles,
The Other of Climate Change brilliantly dispels any possibility of understanding climate change in simplistic or binary terms. It soars beyond the whiteness of climate change and racialized discourse to tangle with the massive and complex ways in which racialized thinking thwarts and compromises attempts to slow climate change, and further racializes those most affected, especially climate change migrants/refugees, reinforcing and re-entangling the state of racialization. Baldwin is a dexterous, complex, and profound thinker.
- Audrey Kobayashi, Patricia Monture distinguished university professor and Queen’s research chair, Geography and Planning, Queen's University,
What are we talking about when we talk about “climate refugees?” We are talking about race. Andrew Baldwin has written an impeccable and devastating immanent critique of the racialized discourses on climate change and migration. My thinking on these issues will never be the same and I hope The Other of Climate Change will be a handbook for climate migration justice for years to come.
- Thomas Nail, distinguished scholar and professor of Philosophy, University of Denver, author of The Figure of the Migrant,
The Other of Climate Change is an excoriating critique of the way White humanism plays out in climate change and migration discourses. This is a must-read book for anyone wishing to understand how racism and white privilege shape not only the material effects of climate change on Black and brown people, but also the discourse about it.
- Marco Armiero, director of the KTH Environmental Humanities Lab in Stockholm,
The Other of Climate Change builds on subversive works of political thought on race and humanism to locate the position of the contemporary ‘climate refugee’ within hierarchies of the human in this time of planetary crisis. Baldwin’s many years of analytical reflection on the active discourses of climate migration result in a theorisation of “racial futurism” in which “white humanism” is rejuvenated through the racialised other of climate change – the figure on the move from rising tides. This deceptively clear book distils the complexity of white humanism’s reinventions through contemporary racisms in this era of climate change and anticipatory governance. While much analysis of race and climate change brings the evils of ecofascism into focus, Baldwin helpfully reminds us that liberal humanism operates as much through structures of racism and white supremacy in their dynamic contemporary forms.
- Lisa Tilley, lecturer in Development Studies, SOAS, London,
[T]his book represents a significant contribution to research on climate change and migration. It should be required reading for scholars of the discipline it targets and for International Relations scholars open to critical discourse on the relationship between the International and Climate Change.
Global Policy
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Preface
Chapter 1 – A Theory of Racial Futurism
Chapter 2 – The Racial Other of Climate Change
Chapter 3 – World White Order
Chapter 4 – From Determinism to Complexity
Chapter 5 – Premediating Climate Change and Migration
Chapter 6 – Adaptive Migration
Chapter 7 – Conclusion
This provocative new series challenges the established field of migration studies to think beyond its policy-oriented frameworks and to engage with the complex and myriad forms in which the global migration regime is changing in the twenty-first century. It proposes to draw together studies that engage with the current transformation of the politics of migration, and the meaning of ‘migrant’, from the below of grassroots, local, transnational and multi-sited coalitions, projects and activisms. Attuned to the contemporary resurgence of migrant-led and migration-related movements, and anti-racist activism, the series builds on work carried out at the critical margins of migration studies to evaluate the ‘border industrial complex’ and its fall-outs, build a decolonial perspective on global migration flows, and critically reassess the link between (im)migration, citizenship and belonging in the cross-border future.
Series Editors: Gavan Titley and Alana Lentin