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From the 1960s to the present, activists, artists, and science ...fiction writers have imagined the consequences of climate change and its impacts on our future. Authors such as Octavia Butler and Leslie Marmon Silko, movie directors such as Bong Joon-Ho, and creators of digital media such as the makers of the Maori web series Anamata Future News have all envisioned future worlds during and after environmental collapse, engaging audiences to think about the earth's sustainability. As public awareness of climate change has grown, so has the popularity of works of climate fiction that connect science with activism.
Today, real-world social movements helmed by Indigenous people and people of color are leading the way against the greatest threat to our environment: the fossil fuel industry. Their stories and movements-in the real world and through science fiction-help us all better understand the relationship between activism and culture, and how both can be valuable tools in creating our future. Imagining the Future of Climate Change introduces readers to the history and most significant flashpoints in climate justice through speculative fictions and social movements, exploring post-disaster possibilities and the art of world-making.
From the 1960s to the present, activists, artists, and science fiction writers have imagined the consequences of climate change and its impacts on our future. Authors such as Octavia Butler and ...Leslie Marmon Silko, movie directors such as Bong Joon-Ho, and creators of digital media such as the makers of the Maori web series Anamata Future News have all envisioned future worlds during and after environmental collapse, engaging audiences to think about the earth's sustainability. As public awareness of climate change has grown, so has the popularity of works of climate fiction that connect science with activism. Today, real-world social movements helmed by Indigenous people and people of color are leading the way against the greatest threat to our environment: the fossil fuel industry. Their stories and movements—in the real world and through science fiction—help us all better understand the relationship between activism and culture, and how both can be valuable tools in creating our future. Imagining the Future of Climate Change introduces readers to the history and most significant flashpoints in climate justice through speculative fictions and social movements, exploring post-disaster possibilities and the art of world-making.
This paper explores the cultural history of UCSD and Southern California as places where speculative theorizing about utopia, dystopia, imagining the future, and reimagining the past has long been ...occurring. The first part is on Fredric Jameson's and Kim Stanley Robinson's theories of utopia and their relevance for the utopian project of public education; the second turns to alternate Afrofuturist worlds and Octavia Butler as an early theorist of neoliberalism; and the third focuses on speculative fictions of education, labor, technology, the future, and the idea of a radically networked enclave of resistance or social movement in the US/Mexico borderlands.
A 1991 piece by Black syndicated columnist Clarence Page, for instance, called "The F. Word to Watch For: Feminists," which was written in the wake of the Hill-Thomas hearings and speculated that the ...Bush administration would demonize "feminists" as a "smoke screen" for "real economic problems," was filed under "Economy. Since her untimely death in 2006, Butler's fame continues to grow as new generations embrace her work, since it speaks to our present in powerful ways. The umbrella term "speculative" is useful both for recognizing the boundary-crossing dimensions of Butler's writing, in its defiance of narrow definitions of genre, and for describing Butler's contributions to feminist theories of knowledge production, political leadership, and imagining the future. Since Butler's archive at the Huntington opened to researchers in 2013, many different bursts of collective activity have happened in her memory using her papers, including the year-long program in 2016 produced by Julia Meltzer and the Los Angeles arts collective Clockshop, titled "Radio Imagination: Artists and Writers in the Archive of Octavia E. Butler," which resulted in the catalog I discuss below. Other musical, scholarly, and filmic responses to Butler's legacy inspired several additional events over the course of the year, which are beautifully documented in the catalog, including a session on Butler and activism with writers Lisa Bolekaja, Tananarive Due, and Steven Barnes; a performative reading of Butler's short story "Speech Sounds" by the Women's Center for Creative Work; a performance of Xenogenesis Suite, a musical tribute to Butler composed by Nicole Mitchell; a redcat exhibition and discussion, led by film and media scholar Kara Keeling, of experimental short films that explore "intersectionality in speculative fiction" (133); a discussion of radical reproduction in Butler's work among myself, philosopher Amy Kind, and Ayana Jamieson; and several more.
This innovative cultural history investigates an intriguing, thrilling, and often lurid assortment of sensational literature that was extremely popular in the United States in 1848--including dime ...novels, cheap story paper literature, and journalism for working-class Americans. Shelley Streeby uncovers themes and images in this "literature of sensation" that reveal the profound influence that the U.S.-Mexican War and other nineteenth-century imperial ventures throughout the Americas had on U.S. politics and culture. Streeby's analysis of this fascinating body of popular literature and mass culture broadens into a sweeping demonstration of the importance of the concept of empire for understanding U.S. history and literature. This accessible, interdisciplinary book brilliantly analyzes the sensational literature of George Lippard, A.J.H Duganne, Ned Buntline, Metta Victor, Mary Denison, John Rollin Ridge, Louisa May Alcott, and many other writers. Streeby also discusses antiwar articles in the labor and land reform press; ideas about Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua in popular culture; and much more. Although the Civil War has traditionally been a major period marker in U.S. history and literature, Streeby proposes a major paradigm shift by using mass culture to show that the U.S.-Mexican War and other conflicts with Mexicans and Native Americans in the borderlands were fundamental in forming the complex nexus of race, gender, and class in the United States.
Streeby reviews several books including Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia by Brian Cremins, Frank Miller's Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism by Paul Young and Hellboy's World: Comics and ...Monsters on the Margins by Scott Bukatman.
This innovative cultural history investigates an intriguing, thrilling, and often lurid assortment of sensational literature that was extremely popular in the United States in 1848--including dime ...novels, cheap story paper literature, and journalism for working-class Americans. Shelley Streeby uncovers themes and images in this "literature of sensation" that reveal the profound influence that the U.S.-Mexican War and other nineteenth-century imperial ventures throughout the Americas had on U.S. politics and culture. Streeby's analysis of this fascinating body of popular literature and mass culture broadens into a sweeping demonstration of the importance of the concept of empire for understanding U.S. history and literature. This accessible, interdisciplinary book brilliantly analyzes the sensational literature of George Lippard, A.J.H Duganne, Ned Buntline, Metta Victor, Mary Denison, John Rollin Ridge, Louisa May Alcott, and many other writers. Streeby also discusses antiwar articles in the labor and land reform press; ideas about Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua in popular culture; and much more. Although the Civil War has traditionally been a major period marker in U.S. history and literature, Streeby proposes a major paradigm shift by using mass culture to show that the U.S.-Mexican War and other conflicts with Mexicans and Native Americans in the borderlands were fundamental in forming the complex nexus of race, gender, and class in the United States.
