Fixing the World

Abstract

What kind of remedy or redress can literature and other forms of counterfactual imagining offer in the face of environmental injustice? This epilogue draws together from the book’s previous chapters insights about consumerism, citizenship, enclosure, and exposure in order to contemplate this question. Pivoting from The Yes Men Fix the World (a 2009 documentary about the culture-jamming pranksters, the Yes Men) to Chinua Achebe’s reflections on the difference between “beneficent” and “malignant” fiction, the epilogue argues that we should understand all such fictions as risky: unpredictable in how their causes and effects work themselves out across time and space. Such risks entail not only exposure to the possibility of harm, but also leaps of faith into the unknown and the as-yet unrealized, as well as the prospect that the innocence we tend to imagine about ourselves might be countered with a newfound sense of complicity, entanglement, or even self-reflexive solidarity.