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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
