Small Predators
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Date
2016
Authors
Black, Jennifer
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Abstract
Small Predators is a novella from the perspective of student activists troubled by their university’s colonial history and its embodiment of neoliberal ideology. They are millenials, a generation with a keen awareness of the human impact on the environment and a sense that it is already too late to prevent total disaster. Small Predators posits that those who attempt to contend with climate change are afflicted with Sianne Ngai’s concept of “stuplimity.” They are first agitated to dissent and then dulled to fatalistic complicity by the eminency of environmental catastrophe, the enormity and complexity of its perpetration, and the perceived impossibility of effectively intervening against it. Through stuplimity, however, comes a cleared affective slate, a radical receptiveness and responsiveness that allows the subjects to understand the world as it is and as they are situated within it, and to create new possibilities of being and being-with the world.
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Keywords
Stuplimity, Ecological writing, Fiction, Creative Thesis, Student activism, Climate change, Neoliberal university