Narrating Apocalypse: The Politics and Aesthetics of Climate Change Attribution and Cape Town's "Day Zero"

Abstract:

In the beginning of 2018, Cape Town made headlines the world over. After three years of drought, the city was facing the prospect of "Day Zero," when all the taps would be shut off and residents would have to line up to collect their water rations. City officials, climatologists, and foreign media all gestured to the crisis's underlying explanation: climate change. Yet on the ground, Capetonians were widely skeptical of this narrative; on many accounts, Day Zero had nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with defective governance. This paper explores how the narrative of Day Zero was produced and legitimated, as well as how it was woven into the larger narrative of climate crisis. It studies why and on what grounds that narrative was contested, and argues that this contestation bears important lessons about the way we narrate climate change more broadly. It employs an interpretive social science method and wrestles with questions of knowledge-production and social drama. Its aspiration is a story of climate change that is both more capacious and more just.