Finalist, 2019 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies A profound intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time Queer Times, Black Futures considers the ...promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and black freedom. Keeling reads selected works, such as Sun Ra's 1972 film Space is the Place and the 2005 film The Aggressives, to juxtapose the Afrofuturist tradition of speculative imagination with the similar "speculations" of corporate and financial institutions. In connecting a queer, cinematic reordering of time with the new possibilities technology offers, Keeling thinks with and through a vibrant conception of the imagination as a gateway to queer times and black futures, and the previously unimagined spaces that they can conjure.
Here Be Dragons Ekman, Stefan; Ekman, Stefar
2013, 2013-02-19
eBook, Book
<!CDATAFantasy worlds are never mere backdrops. They are an integral part of the work, and refuse to remain separate from other elements. These worlds combine landscape with narrative logic by ...incorporating alternative rules about cause and effect or physical transformation. They become actors in the drama--interacting with the characters, offering assistance or hindrance, and making ethical demands. In Here Be Dragons, Stefan Ekman provides a wide-ranging survey of the ubiquitous fantasy map as the point of departure for an in-depth discussion of what such maps can tell us about what is important in the fictional worlds and the stories that take place there. With particular focus on J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Ekman shows how fantasy settings deserve serious attention from both readers and critics. Includes insightful readings of works by Steven Brust, Garth Nix, Robert Holdstock, Terry Pratchett, Charles de Lint, China Mieville, Patricia McKillip, Tim Powers, Lisa Goldstein, Steven R. Donaldson, Robert Jordan, and Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess.>
Gothic Things Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew
07/2023
eBook
Offering an innovative approach to the Gothic, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety breaks ground with a new materialist analysis of the genre, highlighting the ways that, since ...its origins in the eighteenth century, the Gothic has been intensely focused on ominous matter and thing power. In chapters attending to gothic bodies, spaces, books, and other objects, Gothic Things argues that the Gothic has always been about what happens when objects assume mysterious animacy or potency and when human beings are reduced to the status of just one thing among many-more powerful-others.In exploring how the Gothic insistently decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock reveals human beings to be enmeshed in networks of human and nonhuman forces mostly outside of their control. Gothic Things thus resituates the Gothic as the uncanny doppelgnger of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking just beneath the surface (and sometimes explicitly surfacing) as it haunts considerations of how human beings interact with objects and their environment. In these pages the Gothic offers a dark reflection of the contemporary nonhuman turn, expressing a twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse.Substituting horror for hope, the Gothic, Weinstock explains, has been a philosophical meditation on human relations to the nonhuman since its inception, raising significant questions about how we can counter anthropocentric thought in our quest to live more harmoniously with the world around us.
In his 2015 novel, The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro uses an early medieval setting; the action begins in the decades after King Arthur's death and centres around a deep grudge between the resident ...Britons and encroaching Saxons. The landscape of Ishiguro's post-Arthurian Britain is vague and featureless, an intentional choice by the author for presenting an exploration of societal conflict and cultural memory that is untethered to contemporary politics or recently remembered history. This article argues that Ishiguro's perception of early medieval Britain is a product of the same processes of memory and forgetting that are played out within the novel itself. I read the mist of amnesia that issues forth from the aging dragon Querig as a supernatural literalising of Jan Assmann's theory of 'hot' and 'cold' historical consciousness. This fantastical exploration of cultural memory occurs within a 'cold' and removed Arthurian Britain, which supports the extremely 'hot' discussion of embedded cultural animosities. Ishiguro's misty vision of Britain is thus multi-layered, with the forgotten past of Arthur existing both in the text and the modern view of the 'Dark Ages' as lost to time. His critically acclaimed portrayal of early medieval Britain provides a compelling example of how this period can be remembered, and forgotten, within 21st-century fiction.
With Orphans, Ben Tanzer continues his ongoing literary survey of the 21st Century male psyche, yet does so with a newfound twist, contemporary themes set in a world that is anything but. In this ...dystopian tale of a future Chicago, workers are sent off to sell property on Mars to those who can afford to leave, leaving what’s left to those who have little choice but to make do with what’s left behind: burnt out neighborhoods, black helicopters policing the streets, flash mobs, the unemployed in their scruffy suits, robots taking the few jobs that remain, and clones who replace those workers who do find work so that a modicum of family stability can be maintained. It is a story about the impact of work on family. How work warps our best intentions. And how everything we think we know about ourselves looks different during a recession.
This idea is writ large in the world of Orphans, where recession is all we know, work is only available to the lucky few, and this lucky few not only need to fear being replaced on the job, but in their homes and beds.
It is also a story about drugs, surfing, punk music, lost youth, parenting, sex, pop culture as vernacular, and a conscious intersection of Death of a Salesman or Glengarry Glen Ross with the Martian Chronicles.
Looking to the genre of science fiction has allowed Tanzer to produce something new and fresh, expanding both his literary horizons, and the potential market for his work. Tanzer also looks to the story of Bartleby the Scrivener with Orphans, and the question of what are we allowed as workers, and expected to be, or do, when work is fraught with desperation. Ultimately, Orphans is intended to be a contemporary story about manhood and what it means in today’s world, told from the perspective of work and family, and how any of us manage the parameters that family and work produce; but it’s a story told in a futuristic world, where our greatest fears are in fact already realized, because there isn’t enough of anything, and we are all too easily replaced.
This article adopts a phenomenological approach to the notion of "story," drawing most of its examples from texts in the fantasy genre. It proposes that a key to the nature and significance of ...stories may lie in the experiences to which they predictably give rise, something foreshadowed in the famous passage from Sidney's Apology for Poesie of 1581 about "a tale which keepeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner." These experiences are: inevitability; timelessness; realness; loss of self; loss of agency; independence of authorship; addictiveness; dissociation; invocation and containment of threat; and temporary transformation. Additionally, while stories are experienced as intensely meaningful, they resist analysis. The author argues that many of these typical experiences can be illuminated by a knowledge of the differential functioning of the brain's two cortical hemispheres. Drawing on the work of McGilchrist (2009), he proposes that stories are best understood as invitations to re-inhabit the world of the "Old Brain," as represented by the right hemisphere of the cortex. On this basis, he suggests a definition of story as a languaged right hemisphere communication that elicits in its audiences a return to the world of early childhood, in which everything is "all new, and all true," a world in which our "observing selves" are not yet fully operational, and in which we therefore merge with story characters and story events, a world that seems full of meaning--a meaning which we are unable to separate from the concrete people and events in which it is embedded, and which nevertheless offers us an experience, however brief, of self-transformation.
