This article takes as its starting point the realization that existing food regimes and the food systems that enable them are the main drivers of climate change. This, the article notes, is a systemic challenge, but also a profoundly cultural issue as the way that people eat is deeply connected to questions of identity and belonging. The article enters this field of inquiry by studying how the awareness that current food systems are unsustainable is being mediatized and narrated in popular fiction and film. This media often depicts humans in worlds where the current food system has collapsed, forcing also people in the Global North to move or otherwise adapt to a changing climate, and, in the process, to profoundly alter the way they eat. The article discusses two visual texts: Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013), and John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009). The analysis of these texts shows that they employ food, eating and migration to make life in a future transformed by climate change comprehensible to the reader. The article also investigates how the fiction studied connects food and eating to the existing world-system and thus to the material history that is driving the climate crisis.

Ursula Le Guin’s prescient 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven envisions a multitude of utopian or dystopian futures made real by dreams its protagonist is made to have by a manipulating psychologist. The chapter analyzes these layered futures with the help of Gunlög Fur’s concept concurrences (2017) and Kyle Whyte’s observation that Western speculative writing frequently leaves humanity in dystopian and postapocalyptic futures “that erase Indigenous peoples’ perspectives” (2017, 225). The chapter argues that LeGuin’s vision resists the simplistic and single dystopian vision common in normative climate narratives while at the same time centering the ongoing history of colonialism. The ending of the novel thus envisions a radically multifaceted, concurrent, and imperfect future lived in a world made up as much of hope as of ruins.

Diasporic food cultures enter dominant societies through a variety of manners and spaces, in homes, at food fairs, restaurants, through cookbooks, in supermarkets, but also in visual media. This special section investigates how the representations of diasporic food cultures in popular television and film mediate a variety of food traditions which negotiate and challenge dominant societal assumptions about the present, the past and the future of food and eating, and their complex relationships to race, class, gender, identity and the environment. The contributions to the issue note how the meeting of various diasporic culinary traditions and the often already transcultural host food traditions marks the start of new, feminist, decolonial food cultures, identities and futures, which raise critical questions about our food culture. This investigation of the representation of diasporic food cultures not only reveals the continuing transmutation of food cultures but more importantly the transformation of culture as such, within an increasingly polarized, uneven and fortified world where the dominant food system contributes to a social and ecological breakdown.

The American Climate Emergency Narrative reveals reveals how much of what has been called "climate fiction" casts ecological breakdown as an emergency for American capitalist modernity rather than for the planet. The book traces the origins of this narrative back to the arrival of settler capitalism in America, when the understanding of the planet and its people as extractable resources was established. Since then, this narrative has elided the violent history of the climate crisis while at the same time leveraging the military as a bulwark against the crises capitalism has caused, the people it has uprooted, even the ailing planet itself.

The British Union of Fascists was the creation of Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980), a charismatic Conservative MP who turned to Labour in the 1920s only to resign when his attempt to reform the party failed in 1931. Disillusioned with mainstream politics, Mosley founded the authoritarian New Party and after a visit to Mussolini’s Italy in 1932, he re-arranged this political platform into the British Union of Fascists (BUF). BUF united a number of already existing fascist organisations and, in the years that led up to the war, it became the foremost voice of British extreme right politics, and as a visible presence on the streets of London. 

Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971). Roy Ward Baker’s (1916–2010) Hammer Horror production Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde is one of many to connect J. R. Stevenson’s classic story with Jack the Ripper. Stevenson’s novella was published in 1886, two years before the first known ripper murder, and the action of the original story is mostly Soho. However, the notoriety of the Whitechapel murders made the East End the most resonant location for the many remakes and adaptations that followed. Baker’s film moves between a house seemingly on the border between respectable London and a perennially foggy and labyrinthine Whitechapel where all women are young prostitutes, all men rowdy, working class drinkers and where murdered women can be dissected in the alleyways without too much notice. Dr Jekyll, played by Ralph Bates in distinctly Wildean coiffure, enters this warren to harvest the “female hormones” that he hopes to distill into an “elixir of life”. It remains unclear in the film if the elixir confers immortality, but it does transform Dr Jekyll into a dark and voluptuous Miss Hyde played by Martine Beswick. Jekyll’s female persona becomes increasingly dominant, forcing her male double to continue the Whitechapel killings by which the hormones to the elixir are procured, and committing the murders herself when needed.

Considering film and literature from all continents, this chapter identifies and discusses three dominant narrative strands in global pandemic gothic. The first such strand is what Brantlinger and Höglund have termed imperial gothic. Here, the pandemic is strongly associated with non-normative entities (women, the subaltern, the precariat, the racialized or colonized, the queer, the disabled) that seem to challenge the maintenance of the neoliberal modernity on which Anglo/Euro empire rests. The resolution to the pandemic crisis envisioned by these narratives is typically violent and science related and includes a wide reinforcement of normative notions of sex, religion, sexuality, and race.

The second narrative strand disturbs precisely this normative order via feminist, queer, post-, and decolonial depictions of pandemic spread. The chapter observes how such narratives are also often violent, but how the resolution to the crisis is not to yield to the might and normative notions of Anglo/Euro modernity. Instead, the texts studied in the section show humans either trying to escape to spaces outside of the reach of this modernity, or engaging in a direct and revolutionary challenge to the systems and values that organize and fuel it. 

The final narrative strand assumes a less anthropocentric perspective and turns to the pandemic agent not simply as the “single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet”, in the often-cited words of Nobel laurate Joshua Lederberg, but as a legitimate species tasked with maintaining a planetary biodiversity to which “man” now appears as the greatest menace. The analysis here draws from Haraway and Kirksey to show how the resolutions imagined by these texts go beyond the systemic shifts depicted by the second narrative strand, to instead stress the immanent need to recognize how humans are multispecies ecosystems folded into other systems. This recognition typically does not lead to violent closures, but rather by the abandonment, sometimes even the extinction, of the category of “man”.

Limehouse Blues (1934). Directed by Alexander Hall (1894–1968), Limehouse Blues was shot on the US West Coast and describes the collision between British working-class thugs and Chinese ambition in an exoticized and permanently foggy, yet “exciting” London East End. George Raft in yellowface stars as the half Chinese, half white American Harry Young, and Anna May Wong, one of the first Chinese American film stars, as the Chinese seductress Tu Tuan. The plot revolves around Young’s ambitions to take over the smuggling business from local entrepreneur Pug Talbot. The amoral Young has Talbot murdered, a move that also provides him with the opportunity to pursue Talbot’s beautiful stepdaughter Toni (Jean Parker). In an effort to win Toni’s heart, Young puts her up in his own house, relives her of her duties as spotter and pickpocket, and gives her money to shop for in the West End. During her visit to this notably sunnier part of London, Toni falls in love with square jawed Canadian pet-shop owner Eric Benton, setting the stage of the films central love triangle.

Lost in Limehouse or Lady Esmerelda's Predicament (1933).  This American short film directed by Otto Brower (1890–1946) parodies both Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu series. In the film, the young lady Esmeralda has been kidnapped by the villainous Sir Marmaduke Rakes. Allied with a Chinese Tong gang led by a man by the name of Hoo Flung, Rakes keeps Esmeralda prisoner in an opium den over which hangs the sign “Limhouse”.