Eurocentrism, the Anthropocene and Climate Migration in Aniara

Abstract

This article tracks European responses to the climate crisis and migration by way of an analysis of the 2018 film Aniara (Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja), itself an adaptation of the eponymous 1956 epic poem on atomic age anxiety by Swedish Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson. Aniara, it will be argued, foregrounds an existential struggle – of a kind routinely faced elsewhere by people across the globe – by forcing its protagonists to adapt to a world where being European does not automatically confer advantage, and where the looming spectre of the Anthropocene has eradicated privileges gained from centuries of colonialist expansion. In updating Martinson’s response to the nuclear age to cater for a human-created geological epoch, Aniara forces us also to re-examine a narrative of modernity and progress spun by the European Union.