In the face of growing alarm about climate change, contemporary scholars of apocalyptic fiction have begun to raise pragmatic questions about this genre’s effects: What responses does apocalyptic narrative condition readers to have before, during, and after a catastrophic event? Many critics have objected to the clichéd content of dystopian apocalyptic narratives, claiming that their bleak visions induce resignation in readers rather than a will to assert their political and personal agency. Meanwhile, a number of scholars associated with “disaster studies” have noted that the history of twentieth-century disasters suggests that people actually tend to be at their most compassionate after a catastrophe. In response to this tension, this essay takes a dialectical approach to understanding both the critical and reparative aspects of twenty-first-century American apocalyptic fiction. In the first half, it demonstrates that the violent mythmaking in this work is both symptomatic of the “elite panic” characterized by disaster studies and reflective of other decidedly American ideologies. The second half identifies how some of these same apocalyptic texts complicate or even counteract expectations of panic, theft, and violence, providing insights for how readers might cultivate cooperation and community in the wake of an apocalyptic event.

When it comes to food and race, the connection is often one of identity: how the one comes to stand in for the other and vice versa. This chapter invites readers to theorize food and consumption in Asian American literature by attending to food, not as an expression of identity, but as that which profoundly destabilizes (and perhaps even dissolves) identity and by questioning the association between food as matter and race as matter. It focuses on the tropes of ingestion, farming, and environmental and human health in On Such a Full Sea, Chang-rae Lee’s most and least Asian American novel, as a way to meditate on the nature of racial/ethnic (im)materiality. By turning to the crises of food and ecology as sites that trouble the division between the human and the animal, the consumer and the consumed, Lee forces us to reconsider our easy assumptions about racial-ethnic identity and the corporeal integrity that presumably substantiates that identity.