Search Results

Reading against futural accounts of utopia in the work of Jill Dolan and Jose Esteban Muñoz, this chapter examines the significance of solo works which emphasise the ‘here and now’ as a space of personal, social and political intervention. By juxtaposing shows which tackle the uncertain task of planning for a future with intimate, one-to-one performances, it suggests how vulnerability may be deployed to address the exposure to harm faced by marginalised and/or minority subjects while also inviting audiences to recognise alternatives to the status quo. Understood as a focused attentiveness to the present that is not straightforwardly affirmative – and which may paradoxically involve feelings of doubt and vulnerability – optimism in performance describes how opportunities for resistance and change already exist. Such opportunities, though, are also riven with risk – particularly for queer, trans and other non-conforming subjects. Featured practitioners: Deborah Pearson, Ivana Müller, Duncan Macmillan, FK Alexander, Rosana Cade, Nando Messias.

Virginia Woolf’s pacifist commitments prevented her from fully endorsing militant political protest as a productive strategy for emancipation. This orientation is grounded in her belief that violence preserves the ideological structures of oppression and fails to achieve real and positive social change. Instead, her thought and writing explore alternative modes of agency as outlets for more radical emancipatory possibilities. Through a reading of The Years (1937), a historical novel written under the threat of an impending Second World War, this essay traces Woolf’s enquiry into the mechanisms of patriarchal state oppression and the everyday sites, practices, and encounters through which it operates. Using Sara Pargiter as a case study, it probes Woolf’s assertion that women’s status as outsiders is the entry point through which dominant power relations can be challenged and new forms of social freedom negotiated. Building on José Esteban Muñoz’s concepts of “queer futurity”, with its attendant notions of critical idealism, utopia and hope, it argues that Woolf’s everyday pacifist-feminist aesthetic is significant for formulating a future-oriented critique of institutional practices of control over bodies and agents who do not conform to normative standards of personhood.

The introduction offers a new understanding of the politics of institutions and a new transnational account of British realism. The introduction suggests that nineteenth-century British realist novels express the tensions between shared institutional time and unruly anachronisms. In realist novels, especially realist novels in colonial settings, representing how characters inhabit institutions means encountering alternative temporalities and envisioning otherwise possibilities. This introduction makes the case for the importance of nineteenth-century Irish realist novels not only because they exemplify the temporal and political contradictions that define realism but also because their prevalent anachronisms insist that institutional time is not neutral or merely disciplinary: it structures empire.

This chapter demonstrates how Charles Dickens’s novels embrace ‘reactionary reform’: a vision of the future that is actually a return to an anachronistic past. Reactionary reform restores origins that institutions erase in their drive towards futurity, whether those origins are Sissy Jupe’s life with her father in Hard Times, Esther Summerson’s parentage in Bleak House or the humble home that Pip mistakenly disavows in Great Expectations. Reactivating origins allows a different stance towards institutions: instead of settling down and accepting their established rhythms, characters inhabit institutions, dwelling temporarily in them without acceding to their terms. But Dickens’s vision of reform does not extend to everyone. He reinforces settler colonialism by representing particular groups of people as outside of history and futurity altogether. Validating anachronisms and criticising them in turn, Dickens imagines progressive change that rejects modern institutionalism but, in the process, shores up the racialised abstractions upon which settler colonial institutions depend.

This chapter is about science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s novel Dr. Futurity, which entitles the medical profession to raise the healing snake emblem above all other totems in an alternate future of mankind. The novel’s protagonist, Parsons, is a physician who slips in time into the future where healing and surviving are outmoded personal effects readily sacrificed to the future life of the race, species, or kind. Parsons was summoned or met halfway by a renegade Indian clan, led by Clothis, seeking to restore the family values of reproduction in a Teen Age that cooks up its future generation out of the frozen stock taken from boys fixed in preadolescence. Sexuality is thus charged with child abuse. Before Parsons enters the plot as substitute engenderer of a line rededicated to healing, the line Clothis was giving was postcolonial criticism as redemption of the terrible past. Mastery itself would have been overturned through his application of time travel.

Leah Aldridge considers where things might go for Perry in this contemporary moment. She questions: Can we expect to see Perry rebrandin order to broaden his appeal to more mainstream or international markets? What might such changes mean for both his representations of blackness and for his domestic media empire? In doing so, she encourages us to think of Tyler Perry’s image as central to discussions about celebrity, branding, blackness, consumption, marketing, and (international) distribution.

This chapter extends work on the under-representation of women in philosophy by bringing insights from the social sciences about the role of time in exclusionary practices into current debates. Arguing that the time of social life needs to be more widely understood as normative and politicised, I analyse a number of key issues that have already been highlighted, including embodiment, gender schemas and the narrowness of the canon, in order to draw out the way particular assumptions about time compound these issues further. Questioning the seeming ‘common-sense’ notion of time as singular, successive and all-encompassing, I instead show how linear accounts of time actively hide the multiple processes, expectations, responsibilities and histories that must be negotiated by minority philosophers. I argue that a more representative philosophy would recognise, and actively support, the multiple and contradictory temporalities that characterise it.