Article Earth beyond repair: Race and apocalypse in collective imagination Mabel Gergan Florida State University Sara Smith and Pavithra Vasudevan University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Abstract Scholars have argued that geologic proposals for the Anthropocene are entangled with collective imaginaries and geopolitical anxieties. In this article, we analyze three prominent tropes of American apocalyptic films (the “Great Deluge,” the “Nuclear Catacalysm,” and “the Population Bomb”) and map them onto existing geological proposals for the Anthropocene. In staging this encounter, we illustrate how impending ecological disasters in American popular imagination temporally displace the apocalypse into the present or the future. These imaginings of apocalypse evade specific culpability when they imagine a universal human frailty, enacting a darkly ironic reversal of historical and ongoing apocalyptic realities. Drawing on insights from ecocriticism, political geography, postcolonial, decolonial and critical race studies, we argue that the global crisis heralded by the Anthropocene reveals deep-seated fears of racialized others taking over the planet and the decline of white civilization, and we suggest alternative openings for other futures. Keywords Anthropocene, apocalypse, futurity, ecocriticism, critical race theory The tropes of Hollywood apocalyptic films are recognizable: a plucky band of survivors comes together in catastrophe. Major cities are flooded or destroyed, and the protagonists may be set upon by zombies, protect themselves from a dangerous virus, or fight off sentient animals. Will they maintain their humanity in the face of crisis? Or turn to racialized Corresponding author: Sara Smith, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Carolina Hall 222, Campus Box 3220, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3220, USA. Email: shsmith@email.unc.edu Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 0(0) 1–20 ! The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263775818756079 journals.sagepub.com/home/epd