“Cornmeal Pancakes to Stave Off the Apocalypse”: Ordinary Food in “Poison” and Future Home of the Living God

Abstract

Apocalyptic narratives have some pitfalls.

Visions of “the end of the world” can discourage adaptive thinking and ignore that for many communities, the end of the world has already occurred or is ongoing. April Anson describes such narratives as “settler apocalypse”: “stories that tell of the end of the whole world but are, in reality, specific to white settlers,” whose colonialist-capitalist world is threatened by forces such as climate change (63). But what if one replaces “the end of the whole world” with “the end of a world”? As Jessica Hurley and Dan Sinykin suggest, “apocalypse is not singular and universal” but rather “plural and particular” (453). Apocalypses are culturally specific, and they can recur, disrupting the Western sense of a singular future event to be avoided.