The Resilient Apocalypse

"Portraits of 'good battling evil' in the geography of Hell come in many forms in the Hispanic World. Apocalyptic nightmares, fearful images of life, chaos and death are inclusive and interdepEndent, yet simultaneously project an exceptional quality. Where images remain unfulfilled in narrow allegiances to a proscribed End, this investigation explores how narrative logic may challenge unified notions of finalities. Redeploying transglobal character and narrative potential, it distinguishes itself by training the lens on New Beginnings. Its analysis embeds resilient formulas for combating the End through resistance in Latin America and Spain revealed in gilded illustration, decolonizing drama, messianic chronicles and poetry, baroque letters, racially-motivated novels, sexuality-threatening films, and intimidating immigrant photos complete with destruction wreaked by climate change. Through chaos the resilient Apocalypse simultaneously performs as an internal defense (a vehicle for mourning) and a counter-discourse to power (a mechanism for resistance). Its strategy listens to and keeps the enemy 'in sight and in mind,' a formula for grappling with and engaging difference that analyzes the traces left on each other's cultural fabric in an open-Ended, communal struggle. This study argues for decolonizing the politics of the End and reformulating an incomplete, mythical, uncanny quality into a poetics of resistance garnering communal solutions and obligations. Here the Apocalypse is unremittingly sought after to redefine social justice, salvation and reality over time and past collateral damage, ironically providing future hope against itself, the crushing fear of the End. It crystalizes what had yet to be comprehensively explored: how rival traditions internalize competing apocalyptic worldviews to arrive at sustainable plans of action, time-tested, reputable cultural models to control dissension from within and without, and social goals supported by traces the other imprints on their cultural ethos. Bracketing the finality of the End and arguing the process from conflict archaeology toward New Beginnings, salvation, solace or hope, resolves an incomplete myth by negotiating the afterward. Revealing how plural, competing viewpoints of the End go a long way to legitimize each other, this theory of unfulfilled promise forever changes the way we engage the other and value the self"

The climate change is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.

Climate change poses an existential threat to the global economy. While there is a growing body of literature on the economic consequences of climate change, research on the link between climate change and sovereign default risk is nonexistent. We aim to fill this gap in the literature by estimating the impact of climate change vulnerability and resilience on the probability of sovereign debt default. Using a sample of 116 countries over the period 1995–2017, we find that climate change vulnerability and resilience have significant effects on the probability of sovereign debt default, especially among low-income countries. That is, countries with greater vulnerability to climate change face a higher likelihood of debt default compared to more climate resilient countries. These findings remain robust to a battery of sensitivity checks, including alternative measures of sovereign debt default, model specifications, and estimation methodologies.

Now a National Bestseller! Climate change is real but it’s not the end of the world. It is not even our most serious environmental problem. Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions. But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction. Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts. Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas. Curiously, the people who are the most alarmist about the problems also tend to oppose the obvious solutions. What’s really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism? There are powerful financial interests. There are desires for status and power. But most of all there is a desire among supposedly secular people for transcendence. This spiritual impulse can be natural and healthy. But in preaching fear without love, and guilt without redemption, the new religion is failing to satisfy our deepest psychological and existential needs.

Even under the most optimistic scenarios, significant global climate change is now inevitable. While squarely confronting the scale of the risks we face, Building a Resilient Tomorrow presents replicable sustainability successes and clear-cut policy recommendations that can improve the climate resilience of communities in the US and beyond.

Parenting is difficult under the best of circumstances--but extremely daunting when humanity faces cataclysmic annihilation. When the dead rise, hardship, violence and the ever-present threat of flesh-eating zombies will adversely affect parents and children alike. Depending on their age, children will have little chance of surviving a single encounter with the undead, let alone the unending peril of the Zombie Apocalypse. The key to their survival--and thus the survival of the species--will be the caregiving they receive. Drawing on psychological theory and real-world research on developmental status, grief, trauma, mental illness, and child-rearing in stressful environments, this book critically examines factors influencing parenting, and the likely outcomes of different caregiving techniques in the hypothetical landscape of the living dead.

A new approach to the vast nuclear infrastructure and the apocalypses it produces, focusing on Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American literatures Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse, Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses on neglected authors and Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American perspectives. Exchanging the usual white, male “nuclear canon” for authors that include James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ruth Ozeki, Infrastructures of Apocalypse delivers a fresh literary history of post-1945 America that focuses on apocalypse from below. Here Hurley critiques the racialized urban spaces of civil defense and reads nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. Uniting these diverse lines of inquiry is Hurley’s belief that apocalyptic thinking is not the opposite of engagement but rather a productive way of imagining radically new forms of engagement. Infrastructures of Apocalypse offers futurelessness as a place from which we can construct a livable world. It fills a blind spot in scholarship on American literature of the nuclear age, while also offering provocative, surprising new readings of such well-known works as Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and Angels in America. Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a revelation for readers interested in nuclear issues, decolonial literature, speculative fiction, and American studies.