Action Reimagined: Literary Representations of Activism in the Context of the Crisis of the Present

Abstract

Abstract Recent years have witnessed a waning trust in institutions and radical challenges to democratic governance even in resilient democracies, leading to increasing concerns about democratic backsliding and an overall crisis of democracy. The emerging technoliberal rationality, with its neoreactionary tendencies, has contributed to the weakening of communities and the commons (Terranova 2026). Challenges have emerged both from the right and the left but there are few narratives of alternative futures after the destruction of old institutions. Fiction, though, may provide one possible access point to this evolving new socio-economic reality. The present article will analyse two recent novels that focus on environmental activism and its uneasy relationships with wealthy elites. In Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood (2023) a guerrilla gardening collective seeks the support of a tech billionaire. In Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (2024) a spy hired by a conglomerate seeks to undermine an environmental collective. The novels will be discussed with the help of critical apparatus developed from the work of Rachel Jaeggi (2022), Jane Elliott (2018) and Mathias Nilges (2020, 2021). The analysis will ask whether the novels are able to present collective action as a means of resisting the crisis of democracy.