Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association

This article argues that formal and thematic elements of magical realism can bridge reality and fantasy in particularly productive ways when dealing with the imaginative challenges of representing climate change and environmental injustice. My analysis of Benh Zeiltin’s film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, situates magical realism in the emerging environmental discourse about climate change and focuses on the techniques used to make slow violence visible, including the monstrous symbols in the form of beasts that embody climate change and reflect the social anxieties associated with an uncertain planetary future. Magical realism engages with the temporal and spatial scales necessary for depicting the state of risk and crisis associated with anthropogenic climate change, and it produces narratives that include marginalized voices, which are indicators of contemporary environmental ethics in the U.S. that mobilize discourses of race, gender, and class. Finally, the article explores how the film represents the material consequences and cultural anxieties surrounding climate displacement and concludes that stories about climate change refuse narrative closure. The realities of climate change necessitate a shift in the ways we understand humans’ relationship to the material world and the narratives we use to represent it.