The Green and the Black: Ecological Awareness and the Darkness of Noir

Abstract

Ecocritical thought presents serious challenges for political readings of crime fiction and noir, notably in French and American cultural contexts, and these challenges merit a broad examination. How does the Anthropocene change our relation to the frames of intelligibility and the definitions of violence found in crime fictions? The scalar problems introduced by the cosmological perspectives of ecological awareness suggest the need to redraw the frontiers of noir, to imagine new green-black readings that transform our understanding of what counts in and as a noir novel.