Posts Tagged futurity
Speculative Life
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on January 10, 2012
I’m excited to announce the publication of a new Social Text Periscope online dossier, edited by Jayna Brown and I, on Speculative Life.
Here’s part of our description of the theme and its relevance, from our introduction:
In our dystopian present, the term speculation is associated with an epistemology of greed, a sanctioned terrorism, and a neo-imperialism organized around the capture of abstract futures and the subjugation of transnational labor forces. Financial speculators gamble with everyone’s lives, and our times would seem to foreclose on any future at all for many.
But speculation means something else for those who refuse to give its logic over to power and profit. To speculate, the act of speculation, is also to play, to invent, to engage in the practice of imagining. And, as Ernst Bloch said, it may be in our imaginative worlds that we catch glimpses of utopian possibility beyond our present paradigm. At a moment when so many have been struggling to enact alternatives to the depressing world produced by Wall Street’s speculative failures, we need to practice imagining now more than ever.
And here are the wonderful, provocative essays.
Introduction: Speculative Life, by Jayna Brown and Alexis Lothian
A Wilder Sort of Empiricism: Madness, Visions and Speculative Life, by Jayna Brown
Vampires and Cyborgs: Transhuman Ability and Ableism in the work of Octavia Butler and Janelle Monáe, by Moya Bailey
Larissa Lai’s “New Cultural Politics of Intimacy”: Animal. Asian. Cyborg. by Tamara Ho
Speculating Queerer Worlds by Alexis Lothian
Socialist Irrealism: an interview with China Miéville, by Jayna Brown and Alexis Lothian
Race For Life, by Alex Weheliye
So Say We All, by Tavia Nyong’o
The Water Keeps Flowing, by Elizabeth Turgeon
Disappearing Natives: Notes for Future SF&F Stories, by Andrea Hairston
I’m developing a strong love and appreciation for the kind of accessible yet incisive intellectual work we can do in just-over-blog-length, carefully edited and thoughtfully presented crossover scholarly publications like these. I encourage you to read them, teach them, pass them on.
politics, futures, uncertainty
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on August 9, 2011
I’ve been in London for most of the summer, working on the last full chapter of my dissertation and spending time with my family at a time of crisis. It turns out that I’m also here at a time of crisis for the city and the country I come from. (I grew up in Glasgow, where England tends to be seen very much as another country at times like these, but have spent enough formative time in London that it feels like home to me too.) All I’ve seen of the riots in person is one broken window from the bus today, and some discomfiting plumes of smoke from the window of the attic room I’m staying in. But I’ve been watching intensely via Twitter.
My first instinct is to draw connections across space and time: to riots incited by police violence in Oakland and LA, and to British unrest in the 80s of my childhood. Today is my last day in London; I fly back to LA tomorrow, in the uncomfortable certainty that I’m unlikely to be leaving any of this behind. I’ve often had an expat’s nostalgia for British politics, whose problems can seem less overwhelming than their US equivalents; that has thoroughly evaporated over the past year.
As the Conservative government insists that it’s all pure criminality, and tired, dehumanizing assumptions about the race, age, and relative humanity of the criminals get trotted out, it’s pretty crucial to understand the politics of the seemingly apolitical. From journalist Laurie Penny’s Laurie Penny’s powerful blog post Panic in the Streets of London:
In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:
“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”
The chapter I am writing is about dystopia, about––among other things––what it means to describe possible futures when your impetus is the feeling that there will be no future at all. Violence and looting from the excluded and disenfranchised is a way of expressing the inchoate rage that being denied a future creates, as former London Mayor Ken Livingston expressed to the BBC yesterday. It’s an odd feeling to be theorizing around queer theory’s calls to embrace the feeling of no future, to be turning to fictive social breakdowns, on a day like today. Yet making sense of the ways futures are constructed in fiction, history and politics has never felt more urgent to me. Or more complicated.
Gendered Futures, Katharine Burdekin and Reproductive Queer Negativity: No Future Conference post 2 of 2
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on April 9, 2011
Following on from my previous post discussing the No Future conference more generally, my panel was memorable enough for a post of its own. I’ve edited this post from the original as I’ve taken down the full text of my conference paper; I’m working on major revisions for a longer version I hope to publish, and I don’t feel too comfortable having the unfinished version available online, but I am happy to share it if you contact me.
***
I had great copanelists on my “Gendered Futures” panel. Elizabeth Russell gave a paper on ‘Gender Crime and Futures without Women,’ where she opened with this rather fascinating image encouraging Scottish men to donate sperm for the good of the future race (I confess, it makes me imagine Scotland as a nation of lesbian couples, a prospect I find not wholly unappealing). She then moved on from its connotations of virility and white supremacy to talk about two Indian futuristic fictions that, like Swastika Night though in a very different context, imagine women as an endangered species: Manjula Padmanabhan’s 2008 novel Escape and Manish Jhai’s 2004 film Matrubhoomi.
The other panelist was co-organizer Caitríona Ní Dhúill, whose paper on ‘Futures Desired, Future Desires’ discussed queer futurity and anti-futurity by exploring Bloch’s stereotypical and yet utopian representations of femininity.
And then there was me (actually I went first, but it was easiest to put this last), with my paper “The History of No Future: Reproductive Deviance and the Politics of Futurelessness in Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night.” I’m happy to share the paper with anyone who is interested, but I’ve taken it off the public internet for the moment. Here is an abstract:
The critique of normative futurity has been a powerful force in recent queer theory. Lee Edelman, Elizabeth Freeman and Judith Halberstam have variously contemplated the ways in which nonreproductive sexualities and life narratives alter straight understandings of time. But the contemporary discourse of queer temporality rarely pays close attention to the history of cultural meanings associated with reproductive futures. Seeking to trace a longer history for queer models of temporality than is often accounted for, I turn to Katharine Burdekin’s 1937 Swastika Night, a feminist and anti-fascist dystopia first published under the male name Murray Constantine. Imagined dystopian futures, where negative elements of historical materiality are projected as narrowing the range of possible futures, cast what it means to imagine a future––or a lack of one––into sharp relief.
Burdekin’s novel is most often read for its prescience in imagining the horrifying foreclosures of a Nazi victory before the beginning of World War II, but its merging of a disturbing vision of nonsentient femininity with a homoerotic representation of fascism prefigures many concerns of queer studies. In particular, it allows for a reconfiguration of Lee Edelman’s representation of queer anti-futurism as opposition to the conservative ‘reproductive futurism’ he identifies as “the fascism of the baby’s face.” In Swastika Night, futurity’s absence appears via the figures of women reduced to reproductivity, who resist their oppression by mutely failing to give birth to the male children who will render a future biologically possible. Burdekin’s gendered critique of fascist futurity offers a feminist model for futurelessness as a mode of concrete politics. It also makes a complex intervention into discourses around male homosexuality, fascism and nationalism, sympathetically portraying queer sexualities that nevertheless prop up a reproductive futurism aligned with fascism and imperialism.
My paper considers Burdekin’s work as a potential intervention into both historical and contemporary discussions of queerness and futurity. Confronting the rise of European fascism and the seductions as well as the horrors that it proffered, Swastika Night routes modernity’s futures through reproductive bodies in ways that can trouble oppositions that 21st century critical theory often wants to naturalize: between queer and straight time, futurity and negativity, deviant and normative pleasures.
And here are my presentation visuals––made in Prezi to help balance the visual monotony of a mostly text-based presentation. I am pleased with how it turned out.
No future––for who? (post 1 of 2 on Durham’s No Future conference)
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on April 9, 2011
Shortly after the Critical Ethnic Studies conference on Settler Colonialism and the Future of Genocide (liveblogs of which are in the posts preceding this one), I headed across the Atlantic for the No Future Conference at the University of Durham in the UK, part of a year-long series the Institute for Advanced Studies is organizing there on futures.
I had a wonderful time and heard many fascinating papers at both conferences, but looking back on them together, what I notice most is how rare it was for the two sets of conversations––no future and future of genocide, two phrases that have the potential to mean more or less the same thing––to overlap.
My experience felt very structured by the old and new world surroundings. I’m originally from Scotland, but five years in California have accustomed me to freeways, wide open spaces, and a certain newness to even buildings that grandly proclaim their history; to an often visibly manufactured landscape that the CESA conference reminded me to see as a product of settler colonialism and its histories of genocide. The No Future Conference was my first visit to the University of Durham, which is a kind of small, ancient university I’ve never attended. The wood-panelled debating chamber decorated with heraldic shields in the shadow of 900-year-old Durham Cathedral couldn’t have been more different from UC Riverside’s division between a campus gym and recently constructed student center.
And the questions about absent futures asked in Durham were often directly connected to the long history of British knowledge production our location (a stone’s throw from the tomb of the Venerable Bede) made tangible. The apocalyptic as a religious category was often addressed, something I was keen to hear about as it’s an area whose relationship to my own work I’m trying to figure out. Papers from Karen Edwards and Christopher Rowland on apocalypse in Milton and Blake served as reminders of the political ferment, the revolutionary hopes and resistant dreams that bubble up from the canon it’s easy to dismiss as dry, the landscape smoothed into ‘heritage’ by generations of well-heeled undergraduates and overawed tourists.
Highlights of the conference for me included Melanie Adley’s paper “There is a Future in Dying: Female Fragility and Passive Defiance,” about fin de siecle German melodramatic suicide fiction as antisocial feminist queer futurity; John Troyer on the cultural construction of death and unevenly distributed technological efforts to change its future; organizer Alastair Renfrew’s discussion of Lenin as a utopian cultural figure (particularly the allusion to “Lenin in a Jimmy hat”) followed by Sean Grattan’s reading of hipster liberalism in the light of this statue in Seattle; and Lucy Sargisson and Lisa Garforth’s explorations of possible futures for environmental politics through fiction. Internet was patchy in the old buildings (one more old world/new world element) and I missed the immediate archive that tweeting and/or liveblogging makes possible; I make far better notes when I am aware they will have an audience, it turns out.
I will make a separate post about my own paper and the panel I was on. I want to close this general one by going back to Critical Ethnic Studies. Comparisons between two conferences so totally different in scope and scale can’t be taken all that far. But, especially in comparison to CESA, it was impossible not to notice that all of the 50 or so attendees at No Future, all that I met from the EU or US, seemed to be white. I don’t want to make an argument based on demographics, but it’s also true that very few of the papers I heard made any mention of the connections between race and futurity, and though the uneven distribution of futures within global capitalism was mentioned often, we heard little from the perspective of those populations whose access to futurity has been most foreclosed.
I would have loved to bring over some of the speakers from CESA to add the perspectives of Black and Native futures and presents; many presentations I heard at CESA would have fit verbatim into the “no future” theme. Perhaps speakers on these areas were among those who had to cancel due to budget constraints, symptoms of the present crisis in higher education’s economic future. But if there are going to be interdisciplinary conversations about futures of institutions, worlds, socialities, and what we mean when we agonize about their apparent absence, they will be incomplete if they do not take into consideration the racializing pasts and presents of what CESA called “the future of genocide.”