Alexis Lothian
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479811748
- eISBN:
- 9781479854585
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479811748.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Old Futures traverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital media. Centering ...
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Old Futures traverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital media. Centering works by women, queers, and people of color that are marginalized within most accounts of the genre, the book offers a new perspective on speculative fiction studies while reframing established theories of queer temporality by arguing that futures imagined in the past offer new ways to queer the present. Imagined futures have been central to the creation and maintenance of imperial domination and technological modernity; Old Futures rewrites the history of the future by gathering together works that counter such narratives even as they are part of them. Lothian explores how queer possibilities are constructed and deconstructed through extrapolative projections and affective engagements with alternative temporalities. The book is structured in three parts, each addressing one convergence of political economy, theoretical framework, and narrative form that has given rise to a formation of speculative futurity. Six main chapters focus on white feminist utopias and dystopias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; on Afrofuturist narratives that turn the dehumanization of black lives into feminist and queer visions of transformation; on futuristic landscapes in queer speculative cinema; and on fan creators’ digital interventions into televised futures. Two shorter chapters, named “Wormholes” in homage to the science fiction trope of a time-space distortion that connects distant locations, highlight current resonances of the old futures under discussion.Less
Old Futures traverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital media. Centering works by women, queers, and people of color that are marginalized within most accounts of the genre, the book offers a new perspective on speculative fiction studies while reframing established theories of queer temporality by arguing that futures imagined in the past offer new ways to queer the present. Imagined futures have been central to the creation and maintenance of imperial domination and technological modernity; Old Futures rewrites the history of the future by gathering together works that counter such narratives even as they are part of them. Lothian explores how queer possibilities are constructed and deconstructed through extrapolative projections and affective engagements with alternative temporalities. The book is structured in three parts, each addressing one convergence of political economy, theoretical framework, and narrative form that has given rise to a formation of speculative futurity. Six main chapters focus on white feminist utopias and dystopias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; on Afrofuturist narratives that turn the dehumanization of black lives into feminist and queer visions of transformation; on futuristic landscapes in queer speculative cinema; and on fan creators’ digital interventions into televised futures. Two shorter chapters, named “Wormholes” in homage to the science fiction trope of a time-space distortion that connects distant locations, highlight current resonances of the old futures under discussion.
Kara Keeling
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780814748329
- eISBN:
- 9781479841998
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814748329.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Contestations over “the future” and “futurity” have been central to formulations of time throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Queer Times, Black Futures considers the ...
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Contestations over “the future” and “futurity” have been central to formulations of time throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Queer Times, Black Futures considers the implications of scholarly, artistic, and popular investments in the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation that have persisted in Euro-American culture. Of specific interest are those Afrofuturist cultural forms and logics through which creative engagements with Black existence, technology, space, and time might be accessed and analyzed.Punctuated throughout by meditations on Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener,”his project thinks with and through a vibrant concept of the imagination as a way to open onto perceptions of queer times and black futures, and of the spatial politics that might be associated with them.Less
Contestations over “the future” and “futurity” have been central to formulations of time throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Queer Times, Black Futures considers the implications of scholarly, artistic, and popular investments in the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation that have persisted in Euro-American culture. Of specific interest are those Afrofuturist cultural forms and logics through which creative engagements with Black existence, technology, space, and time might be accessed and analyzed.Punctuated throughout by meditations on Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener,”his project thinks with and through a vibrant concept of the imagination as a way to open onto perceptions of queer times and black futures, and of the spatial politics that might be associated with them.
Devon Powers
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252042874
- eISBN:
- 9780252051739
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042874.003.0007
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
Chapter 6 explores the politics of trend forecasting. Deepening the focus from the previous chapter, it explores how trends can inadvertently import the biases of the present into future imaginaries. ...
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Chapter 6 explores the politics of trend forecasting. Deepening the focus from the previous chapter, it explores how trends can inadvertently import the biases of the present into future imaginaries. As a counterexample, the chapter highlights Afrofuturism, a genre of futures thinking that is both radical in its visions for the future and deeply connected to the historical legacies of blackness.Less
Chapter 6 explores the politics of trend forecasting. Deepening the focus from the previous chapter, it explores how trends can inadvertently import the biases of the present into future imaginaries. As a counterexample, the chapter highlights Afrofuturism, a genre of futures thinking that is both radical in its visions for the future and deeply connected to the historical legacies of blackness.
Cameron Leader-Picone
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781496824516
- eISBN:
- 9781496824547
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496824516.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This coda briefly addresses the election of Donald Trump and the implications of an increasingly visible white nationalist movement on the arguments of the book. The coda also analyzes elements of ...
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This coda briefly addresses the election of Donald Trump and the implications of an increasingly visible white nationalist movement on the arguments of the book. The coda also analyzes elements of the Black Lives Matter movement to argue that while much of the optimism of the post era has been mitigated, several of its major theoretical strains—the emphasis on individual agency over racial identity, the turn towards racial identity as performance—remain critical to understanding current activism. It also explains the influence of theoretical frameworks such as intersectionality and Afropessimism on current movements. The coda also looks briefly towards growing and ongoing trends in African American literature, like Afrofuturism.Less
This coda briefly addresses the election of Donald Trump and the implications of an increasingly visible white nationalist movement on the arguments of the book. The coda also analyzes elements of the Black Lives Matter movement to argue that while much of the optimism of the post era has been mitigated, several of its major theoretical strains—the emphasis on individual agency over racial identity, the turn towards racial identity as performance—remain critical to understanding current activism. It also explains the influence of theoretical frameworks such as intersectionality and Afropessimism on current movements. The coda also looks briefly towards growing and ongoing trends in African American literature, like Afrofuturism.
Alexis Lothian
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479811748
- eISBN:
- 9781479854585
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479811748.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Part 2 (A Now that Can Breed Futures: Queerness and Pleasure in Black Science Fiction) turns to black diasporic speculative imagining as it has been used to create futures for those rendered ...
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Part 2 (A Now that Can Breed Futures: Queerness and Pleasure in Black Science Fiction) turns to black diasporic speculative imagining as it has been used to create futures for those rendered futureless by global white supremacy. Chapter 3 focuses on how speculative fiction, racialized reproduction, and queer possibility converge to articulate processes that breed futures, and how these connections underlie the emergence in the 2000s of a canon of literary black science fiction. It introduces pleasure as a central term, tracing figurations of a radical future for black female sexuality that emerge from narrative foreclosures in W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 “The Comet” and following their trail into the queer speculations of two black feminist vampire novels: Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991) and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005). Du Bois’s text highlights the persistence of reproductive Afrofuturisms that have sometimes overlapped with eugenic discourses. Gomez and Butler pick up this thread to demand we think reproductive futures outside the logics of heteronormativity and white supremacy, using the figure of the vampire to envision a decolonial lesbian future and a speculative reconsideration of eugenic science respectively.Less
Part 2 (A Now that Can Breed Futures: Queerness and Pleasure in Black Science Fiction) turns to black diasporic speculative imagining as it has been used to create futures for those rendered futureless by global white supremacy. Chapter 3 focuses on how speculative fiction, racialized reproduction, and queer possibility converge to articulate processes that breed futures, and how these connections underlie the emergence in the 2000s of a canon of literary black science fiction. It introduces pleasure as a central term, tracing figurations of a radical future for black female sexuality that emerge from narrative foreclosures in W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 “The Comet” and following their trail into the queer speculations of two black feminist vampire novels: Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991) and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005). Du Bois’s text highlights the persistence of reproductive Afrofuturisms that have sometimes overlapped with eugenic discourses. Gomez and Butler pick up this thread to demand we think reproductive futures outside the logics of heteronormativity and white supremacy, using the figure of the vampire to envision a decolonial lesbian future and a speculative reconsideration of eugenic science respectively.
Tavia Nyong'o
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479856275
- eISBN:
- 9781479806386
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479856275.003.0007
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gay and Lesbian Studies
This chapter enlists Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the “dark precursor”—the manner in which the past prefigures its future without determining or representing it—to give a different account of the role ...
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This chapter enlists Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the “dark precursor”—the manner in which the past prefigures its future without determining or representing it—to give a different account of the role antinormativity plays in the past, present, and future of queer theory. By reading Samuel R. Delany’s early fictions as a pos-thumanist problematization of norms of race, gender, sexuality, and species being, and by understanding the problematic split between “afrofuturism” and “queer theory” in the 1990s, we regain a sense of how central blackness has been to the genesis of queer theorizing.Less
This chapter enlists Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the “dark precursor”—the manner in which the past prefigures its future without determining or representing it—to give a different account of the role antinormativity plays in the past, present, and future of queer theory. By reading Samuel R. Delany’s early fictions as a pos-thumanist problematization of norms of race, gender, sexuality, and species being, and by understanding the problematic split between “afrofuturism” and “queer theory” in the 1990s, we regain a sense of how central blackness has been to the genesis of queer theorizing.
Justin Adams Burton
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190235451
- eISBN:
- 9780190235499
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190235451.003.0006
- Subject:
- Music, History, American, History, Western
Posthuman Rap leads to a posthuman vestibule, connected to and aware of neoliberal humanism but situated just outside of it, in a place where we might imagine other ways of being human. Big ...
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Posthuman Rap leads to a posthuman vestibule, connected to and aware of neoliberal humanism but situated just outside of it, in a place where we might imagine other ways of being human. Big K.R.I.T.’s car, quaking with sub-bass blasting from his woofer, is exactly this kind of vestibule. K.R.I.T., working with AfroFuturist materials, uses it to create big bangs and new worlds beyond our own. But before he can call entire planets into being, he must first tune his vestibule to receive and transmit vibrations from beyond the edge of human perception. It’s from this vantage point, staring through the vibrating glass of his car, that he can imagine other ways of being human.Less
Posthuman Rap leads to a posthuman vestibule, connected to and aware of neoliberal humanism but situated just outside of it, in a place where we might imagine other ways of being human. Big K.R.I.T.’s car, quaking with sub-bass blasting from his woofer, is exactly this kind of vestibule. K.R.I.T., working with AfroFuturist materials, uses it to create big bangs and new worlds beyond our own. But before he can call entire planets into being, he must first tune his vestibule to receive and transmit vibrations from beyond the edge of human perception. It’s from this vantage point, staring through the vibrating glass of his car, that he can imagine other ways of being human.
Isiah Lavender (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781628461237
- eISBN:
- 9781626740686
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628461237.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Black and Brown Planets, edited by Isiah Lavender, III, signifies a timely exploration of the Western obsession with color in its analysis of the sometimes contrary intersections of politics and race ...
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Black and Brown Planets, edited by Isiah Lavender, III, signifies a timely exploration of the Western obsession with color in its analysis of the sometimes contrary intersections of politics and race in science fiction. The contributors, including De Witt D. Kilgore, Edward James, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen S. Barr, among others, explore some of the possible worlds of science fiction (literature, television, and film) to lift blacks, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples out from the background of this historically white genre. In two sections, this collection considers the role that race and ethnicity plays in our visions of the future. The first section emphasizes the political elements of black identity portrayed in science fiction from Black America to the vast reaches of interstellar space framed by racial history. Analysis of Indigenous science fiction in the second section addresses the effects of colonization, assists in discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovers ancestral traditions in order to adapt in a post-Native-apocalyptic world. Likewise, the second section explores the affinity between science fiction and subjectivity in Latin American cultures from the role of science and industrialization to the effects of being and moving between two cultures, effectively alienated as a response to political repression. Black and Brown Planets considers how alternate racial futurisms reconfigure our sense of viable political futures in which people of color determine human destiny and, therefore, adds more color to this otherwise monochrome genre.Less
Black and Brown Planets, edited by Isiah Lavender, III, signifies a timely exploration of the Western obsession with color in its analysis of the sometimes contrary intersections of politics and race in science fiction. The contributors, including De Witt D. Kilgore, Edward James, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen S. Barr, among others, explore some of the possible worlds of science fiction (literature, television, and film) to lift blacks, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples out from the background of this historically white genre. In two sections, this collection considers the role that race and ethnicity plays in our visions of the future. The first section emphasizes the political elements of black identity portrayed in science fiction from Black America to the vast reaches of interstellar space framed by racial history. Analysis of Indigenous science fiction in the second section addresses the effects of colonization, assists in discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovers ancestral traditions in order to adapt in a post-Native-apocalyptic world. Likewise, the second section explores the affinity between science fiction and subjectivity in Latin American cultures from the role of science and industrialization to the effects of being and moving between two cultures, effectively alienated as a response to political repression. Black and Brown Planets considers how alternate racial futurisms reconfigure our sense of viable political futures in which people of color determine human destiny and, therefore, adds more color to this otherwise monochrome genre.
Isiah Lavender III
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781628461237
- eISBN:
- 9781626740686
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628461237.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
With his introduction, “Coloring Race in Science Fiction,” Isiah Lavender, III provides answers to why he and others study race and racism in SF, that invoking race and racism in an outwardly white ...
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With his introduction, “Coloring Race in Science Fiction,” Isiah Lavender, III provides answers to why he and others study race and racism in SF, that invoking race and racism in an outwardly white genre is necessary. Coloring science fiction is an absolute and radical commitment because skin color matters in visions of the future. SF has charted a few of the alternatives for this unknown territory, and the change presents both opportunities and challenges for society to establish new values.Less
With his introduction, “Coloring Race in Science Fiction,” Isiah Lavender, III provides answers to why he and others study race and racism in SF, that invoking race and racism in an outwardly white genre is necessary. Coloring science fiction is an absolute and radical commitment because skin color matters in visions of the future. SF has charted a few of the alternatives for this unknown territory, and the change presents both opportunities and challenges for society to establish new values.
De Witt Douglas Kilgore
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781628461237
- eISBN:
- 9781626740686
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628461237.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
De Witt Kilgore, in “The Best is Yet to Come”: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Reform Afrofuturism,” dissects Star Trek’s projection of an endless white future by directly challenging the intent of ...
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De Witt Kilgore, in “The Best is Yet to Come”: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Reform Afrofuturism,” dissects Star Trek’s projection of an endless white future by directly challenging the intent of Star Trek’s racial politics with its practice of reinstating customary racial traditions. Kilgore argues that the DS9 episode “Far Beyond the Stars” allows the series to confront African American history as a root of the Federation’s utopian future as a reform afrofuturism.Less
De Witt Kilgore, in “The Best is Yet to Come”: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Reform Afrofuturism,” dissects Star Trek’s projection of an endless white future by directly challenging the intent of Star Trek’s racial politics with its practice of reinstating customary racial traditions. Kilgore argues that the DS9 episode “Far Beyond the Stars” allows the series to confront African American history as a root of the Federation’s utopian future as a reform afrofuturism.
Jane Caputi
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- July 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190902704
- eISBN:
- 9780190902742
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190902704.003.0009
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics, Political Theory
Throughout world oral traditions, literature, pop culture, and the visual arts, numerous stories, ancient and new, feature a solution to social and environmental crisis that takes shape in a calling ...
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Throughout world oral traditions, literature, pop culture, and the visual arts, numerous stories, ancient and new, feature a solution to social and environmental crisis that takes shape in a calling and a calling upon the “Mutha’,” resulting in a return of a departed life force-source and a renewal of the world. Examples come from Hopi, Greek, and Japanese traditions, as well as contemporary culture. A call to the mother particularly characterizes Afrofuturism, including the poetry of June Jordan, the art of John Thomas Biggers, Kevin Sampson, and Wangechi Mutu, the novels of Octavia Butler, and the musical compositions and poetry of Nicole Mitchell. These stories offer wisdom and direction for spiritual-political activism to bring about a world other than the Anthropocene.Less
Throughout world oral traditions, literature, pop culture, and the visual arts, numerous stories, ancient and new, feature a solution to social and environmental crisis that takes shape in a calling and a calling upon the “Mutha’,” resulting in a return of a departed life force-source and a renewal of the world. Examples come from Hopi, Greek, and Japanese traditions, as well as contemporary culture. A call to the mother particularly characterizes Afrofuturism, including the poetry of June Jordan, the art of John Thomas Biggers, Kevin Sampson, and Wangechi Mutu, the novels of Octavia Butler, and the musical compositions and poetry of Nicole Mitchell. These stories offer wisdom and direction for spiritual-political activism to bring about a world other than the Anthropocene.
Kara Keeling
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780814748329
- eISBN:
- 9781479841998
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814748329.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter takes the refrain from Sun Ra’s film Space Is the Place as an opening for a discussion about how the temporalities of particular Afrofuturist cultural productions participate in ...
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This chapter takes the refrain from Sun Ra’s film Space Is the Place as an opening for a discussion about how the temporalities of particular Afrofuturist cultural productions participate in reorienting speculative imaginations toward the presently impossible, thereby emphasizing the salience of Gilbert Simondon’s theory of “transindividuation” as an intervention into Western conceptualizations of Being.Less
This chapter takes the refrain from Sun Ra’s film Space Is the Place as an opening for a discussion about how the temporalities of particular Afrofuturist cultural productions participate in reorienting speculative imaginations toward the presently impossible, thereby emphasizing the salience of Gilbert Simondon’s theory of “transindividuation” as an intervention into Western conceptualizations of Being.
Kara Keeling
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780814748329
- eISBN:
- 9781479841998
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814748329.003.0009
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter turns to a consideration of Glissant’s broader concept of “Relation.” Here, Alice Coltrane’s errant sonic experiments with Asian musical forms offer a way to think about a different ...
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This chapter turns to a consideration of Glissant’s broader concept of “Relation.” Here, Alice Coltrane’s errant sonic experiments with Asian musical forms offer a way to think about a different constellation of Afrofuturism, one that turns not toward outer space, as in the case of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place, but toward an exploration of inner worlds as harbingers of another organization of things within the present. From Alice Coltrane’s Afro-Asian imagination, I turn to Nnedi Okorafor’s and Wanuri Kahui’s recent speculations on Africa, in particular Okorafor’s 2010 novel,Who Fears Death, and Kahui’s short film,Pumzi, from 2009. These fictional texts offer errantry, myths, and stories as generative strategies through which the dystopian speculations of Africa on which corporate scenarios rely might be resisted and the worlds those dystopian imaginations work to suppress can be felt.Less
This chapter turns to a consideration of Glissant’s broader concept of “Relation.” Here, Alice Coltrane’s errant sonic experiments with Asian musical forms offer a way to think about a different constellation of Afrofuturism, one that turns not toward outer space, as in the case of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place, but toward an exploration of inner worlds as harbingers of another organization of things within the present. From Alice Coltrane’s Afro-Asian imagination, I turn to Nnedi Okorafor’s and Wanuri Kahui’s recent speculations on Africa, in particular Okorafor’s 2010 novel,Who Fears Death, and Kahui’s short film,Pumzi, from 2009. These fictional texts offer errantry, myths, and stories as generative strategies through which the dystopian speculations of Africa on which corporate scenarios rely might be resisted and the worlds those dystopian imaginations work to suppress can be felt.
Katia Pizzi
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780719097096
- eISBN:
- 9781526146694
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526121219.00015
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
The concluding section Ex machina outlines the tensions and trajectories that mark the transition of the futurist machine from the machine age to the current virtual reality and digital age. ...
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The concluding section Ex machina outlines the tensions and trajectories that mark the transition of the futurist machine from the machine age to the current virtual reality and digital age. Borrowing from Munari’s ‘useless’ machine, the contemporary machine is dematerialised and abstracted. As such it both stems from and mirrors a radically altered technological paradigm: post-mechanical, post-industrial and digital. In a final twist, the machine of our own age is no longer the object of aesthetic or ideological worship or the demon of Taylorist dystopias. Rather, AIs and robots act with their own agency, supplying the subjectivity to compose and visualise art in sophisticated, if increasingly worrisome, entanglements with us humans. Taking over from Chapter 1, this section outlines the contemporary debate over machine technology and explores some of its most creative manifestations (e.g. afrofuturism).Less
The concluding section Ex machina outlines the tensions and trajectories that mark the transition of the futurist machine from the machine age to the current virtual reality and digital age. Borrowing from Munari’s ‘useless’ machine, the contemporary machine is dematerialised and abstracted. As such it both stems from and mirrors a radically altered technological paradigm: post-mechanical, post-industrial and digital. In a final twist, the machine of our own age is no longer the object of aesthetic or ideological worship or the demon of Taylorist dystopias. Rather, AIs and robots act with their own agency, supplying the subjectivity to compose and visualise art in sophisticated, if increasingly worrisome, entanglements with us humans. Taking over from Chapter 1, this section outlines the contemporary debate over machine technology and explores some of its most creative manifestations (e.g. afrofuturism).
Jesse Schotter
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474424776
- eISBN:
- 9781474445009
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424776.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The final chapter examines post-War American fiction and the imaginative connection forged, in theory and in fiction, between hieroglyphs and code, computers, and electronic writing. It contends that ...
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The final chapter examines post-War American fiction and the imaginative connection forged, in theory and in fiction, between hieroglyphs and code, computers, and electronic writing. It contends that the association of hieroglyphs with universal languages and mixtures of media gets passed down to the newest of new media, digital code. From the postmodern novels of Thomas Pynchon through the literary-inflected sci-fi of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, from the Afro-Futurist works of Ishmael Reed to the mass market novels of Dan Brown, this pairing of hieroglyphs and digital code recurs across genre and style. By linking code with Egyptian writing, these writers emphasize the performativity of their language; just as code can create a simulation of reality, so words can call characters and settings into being.
Less
The final chapter examines post-War American fiction and the imaginative connection forged, in theory and in fiction, between hieroglyphs and code, computers, and electronic writing. It contends that the association of hieroglyphs with universal languages and mixtures of media gets passed down to the newest of new media, digital code. From the postmodern novels of Thomas Pynchon through the literary-inflected sci-fi of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, from the Afro-Futurist works of Ishmael Reed to the mass market novels of Dan Brown, this pairing of hieroglyphs and digital code recurs across genre and style. By linking code with Egyptian writing, these writers emphasize the performativity of their language; just as code can create a simulation of reality, so words can call characters and settings into being.
Justin Adams Burton
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190235451
- eISBN:
- 9780190235499
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190235451.003.0002
- Subject:
- Music, History, American, History, Western
Posthumanism is most often theorized as a technological/human hybridity, but here I consider a posthumanism that follows Sylvia Wynter’s insistence on a humanism that “exists outside the present ...
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Posthumanism is most often theorized as a technological/human hybridity, but here I consider a posthumanism that follows Sylvia Wynter’s insistence on a humanism that “exists outside the present conception of what it is to be human.” That present conception is neoliberal humanism, which constructs the human in the image of a hyper-capitalist marketplace that favors whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and fixed gender identities. Here, I turn toward a posthumanism that uses critical race and queer theories to find ways of being that are less violent to those who are black, queer, and feminine. What I’m interested in here is the kind of posthumanity that actively reconstructs what has long been a violently restrictive category: human.Less
Posthumanism is most often theorized as a technological/human hybridity, but here I consider a posthumanism that follows Sylvia Wynter’s insistence on a humanism that “exists outside the present conception of what it is to be human.” That present conception is neoliberal humanism, which constructs the human in the image of a hyper-capitalist marketplace that favors whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and fixed gender identities. Here, I turn toward a posthumanism that uses critical race and queer theories to find ways of being that are less violent to those who are black, queer, and feminine. What I’m interested in here is the kind of posthumanity that actively reconstructs what has long been a violently restrictive category: human.
Anna McFarlane
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198846666
- eISBN:
- 9780191881817
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198846666.003.0013
- Subject:
- Physics, Theoretical, Computational, and Statistical Physics
Cyberpunk science fiction broke new ground in terms of AI representation; William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the ur-text of cyberpunk, introduced the term ‘cyberspace’, and this spatialized ...
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Cyberpunk science fiction broke new ground in terms of AI representation; William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the ur-text of cyberpunk, introduced the term ‘cyberspace’, and this spatialized metaphor for data creates an environment that can be inhabited by AIs, rather than an idea of the AI being located in one ‘body’, or in one static place. This chapter explores the possibilities opened by this innovation and by cyberpunk’s continued interrogation of AI as a phenomenon that is dispersed throughout networks, particularly focusing on William Gibson, in the Afrofuturist movement through a reading of Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), and on the work of writers who have been characterized as ‘post-cyberpunk’, such as Cory Doctorow, who shows how algorithms and artificial intelligences can have unexpected, international, and economic consequences.Less
Cyberpunk science fiction broke new ground in terms of AI representation; William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the ur-text of cyberpunk, introduced the term ‘cyberspace’, and this spatialized metaphor for data creates an environment that can be inhabited by AIs, rather than an idea of the AI being located in one ‘body’, or in one static place. This chapter explores the possibilities opened by this innovation and by cyberpunk’s continued interrogation of AI as a phenomenon that is dispersed throughout networks, particularly focusing on William Gibson, in the Afrofuturist movement through a reading of Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), and on the work of writers who have been characterized as ‘post-cyberpunk’, such as Cory Doctorow, who shows how algorithms and artificial intelligences can have unexpected, international, and economic consequences.
Jonathan Weinel
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- March 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190671181
- eISBN:
- 9780190671228
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190671181.003.0005
- Subject:
- Music, Popular
This chapter explores how sound systems place electronic sounds in a social context, eliciting powerful affective experiences that are framed by conceptual meaning. The chapter begins by tracing the ...
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This chapter explores how sound systems place electronic sounds in a social context, eliciting powerful affective experiences that are framed by conceptual meaning. The chapter begins by tracing the origins of the sound system culture and dub-reggae of Jamaica. This approach, which prioritizes DJ performances over ‘live’ musicians, would prefigure the electronic dance music culture of the 1980s and 1990s. Exploring this area, this chapter examines how the design of Chicago house and Detroit techno provided high-energy dance experiences that reflected the ethos of the respective sub-cultures. Later, in the UK rave scene, breakbeat hardcore, drum & bass, and ambient house each used sound design to support an accelerated youth-culture fuelled by ecstasy, delivering trance-like experiences framed by conceptual meaning. In the global Goa trance and psy-trance scenes, this capability is explicitly characterized as ‘technoshamanic’, and the DJ as a ‘master of ecstasies’.Less
This chapter explores how sound systems place electronic sounds in a social context, eliciting powerful affective experiences that are framed by conceptual meaning. The chapter begins by tracing the origins of the sound system culture and dub-reggae of Jamaica. This approach, which prioritizes DJ performances over ‘live’ musicians, would prefigure the electronic dance music culture of the 1980s and 1990s. Exploring this area, this chapter examines how the design of Chicago house and Detroit techno provided high-energy dance experiences that reflected the ethos of the respective sub-cultures. Later, in the UK rave scene, breakbeat hardcore, drum & bass, and ambient house each used sound design to support an accelerated youth-culture fuelled by ecstasy, delivering trance-like experiences framed by conceptual meaning. In the global Goa trance and psy-trance scenes, this capability is explicitly characterized as ‘technoshamanic’, and the DJ as a ‘master of ecstasies’.
Kevin Whitehead
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190847579
- eISBN:
- 9780190948306
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190847579.003.0007
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
Between 1972 and 1984, Hollywood produced several lavish jazz-related films. The failure of Lady Sings the Blues to do justice to the life or music of Billie Holiday is detailed. Martin Scorsese’s ...
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Between 1972 and 1984, Hollywood produced several lavish jazz-related films. The failure of Lady Sings the Blues to do justice to the life or music of Billie Holiday is detailed. Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York is a swing-era musical about a clash of artistic temperaments and of musical styles, reinforced by a disjunction between stylized sets and naturalistic acting. Gangsters and musicians mix in Francis Ford Coppola’s film about Harlem’s historic Cotton Club. In the 1970s, low-budget features are also produced: TV biopics of Louis Armstrong (with Ben Vereen) and Scott Joplin (Billy Dee Williams), and the Afrofuturist spectacle Space Is the Place, starring bandleader Sun Ra as an interstellar traveler come to rescue Earth’s black people.Less
Between 1972 and 1984, Hollywood produced several lavish jazz-related films. The failure of Lady Sings the Blues to do justice to the life or music of Billie Holiday is detailed. Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York is a swing-era musical about a clash of artistic temperaments and of musical styles, reinforced by a disjunction between stylized sets and naturalistic acting. Gangsters and musicians mix in Francis Ford Coppola’s film about Harlem’s historic Cotton Club. In the 1970s, low-budget features are also produced: TV biopics of Louis Armstrong (with Ben Vereen) and Scott Joplin (Billy Dee Williams), and the Afrofuturist spectacle Space Is the Place, starring bandleader Sun Ra as an interstellar traveler come to rescue Earth’s black people.
Jeffrey Insko
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198825647
- eISBN:
- 9780191864285
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198825647.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
The book’s final chapter turns to the twenty-first-century historical present to examine the resurgence of pious warnings about the dangers of presentism in current debates over historical monuments ...
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The book’s final chapter turns to the twenty-first-century historical present to examine the resurgence of pious warnings about the dangers of presentism in current debates over historical monuments and other forms of historical commemoration. After linking, by way of Afrofuturism, the recent political slogan #StayWoke to the political disposition identified in the book’s previous chapters, I turn to debates about the renaming of college buildings in order to challenge the ideas about history promoted by antipresentists, whose claims are themselves often ahistorical. The historiographical injunction against presentism, I claim, has unwittingly sustained white supremacy in the United States. I feel strongly that we’re not yet done with history—but not done precisely because of, not despite, the history that we inhabit.Less
The book’s final chapter turns to the twenty-first-century historical present to examine the resurgence of pious warnings about the dangers of presentism in current debates over historical monuments and other forms of historical commemoration. After linking, by way of Afrofuturism, the recent political slogan #StayWoke to the political disposition identified in the book’s previous chapters, I turn to debates about the renaming of college buildings in order to challenge the ideas about history promoted by antipresentists, whose claims are themselves often ahistorical. The historiographical injunction against presentism, I claim, has unwittingly sustained white supremacy in the United States. I feel strongly that we’re not yet done with history—but not done precisely because of, not despite, the history that we inhabit.