The Land Is Hospitable and So Are We: Rethinking the Frontier Myth and Envisioning Post-Apocalyptic Futurity in Severance (2018) by Ling Ma

The American frontier myth, long embedded in the nation’s cultural and literary imagination, has functioned as a vehicle for narratives of expansion, individualism, and survival. While scholars have thoroughly examined its ideological implications, its influence persists, particularly in post-apocalyptic narratives, where key aspects of frontier mythology and the Western genre are consistently evoked (Slotkin 1993; Peterson 2014; Keeler 2018; Romanzi 2023). Focusing on Severance (2018) by Chinese American author Ling Ma, this presentation argues that this novel complicates this inheritance, offering a speculative revision not only of the frontier myth, but also of the post-apocalyptic tradition, resisting the genre’s conventional tropes and ideologies. Blending post-apocalyptic fiction with an immigration narrative and workplace satire, Severance follows Candace Chen, a millennial office worker in New York, who survives a global pandemic caused by Shen Fever, a fungal infection originating in China, that spreads globally, leading to societal collapse. While post-apocalyptic fiction traditionally reimagines the frontier as a violent world where “the natural or, rather, supernatural” usually ends up “reclaim[ing] culture, and civilization reverts to savagery” (Carter 2017, 124), as humans fight against each other and non-human entities for survival, Severance, as a narrative of climate crisis, rejects cynical and individualistic views of humanity typically enshrined in the genre, rather embracing a vision of renewal that fosters new kinship arrangements, both among the human and non-human worlds. Read through a posthuman feminist perspective (as theorized by Braidotti 2022), the novel––particularly through the pregnancy storyline––conceives reproduction as a “gestational power” (176), which not only enables marginalized groups to assert their existence in defiance of systemic erasure but also articulates a sense of futurity against the backdrop of climate change and societal collapse. Consequently, the frontier-like post-apocalyptic city, once reclaimed by nature, transforms into a hospitable place, a site of “urban nature” (as intended by Bracke 2018) where Candance establishes “meaningful connections and a sense of belonging to uniquely urban natural spaces” (84). In rejecting both the nature-city dichotomy and the civilizing imperative of the frontier myth, Severance reimagines survival beyond conquest, offering an alternative vision of post-apocalyptic futurity.