In Samit Basu’s SF novel Chosen Spirits (2020), a character offers a cosmology of power within India’s capital city: ‘Delhi has always been a city of seven walls […] You could guess you’d crashed into your wall before, when you couldn’t go further, but now the walls can be mapped and measured, the tools exist.’ Written against the backdrop of India’s discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the protests against it in 2019–20, Chosen Spirits extrapolates a near-future Delhi in which, despite the relative success of the protests, the stark inequalities of caste, class and religion have been reinforced by changes to the city’s geography, and state surveillance increasingly precludes the possibility of working for change. Reading the novel alongside other recent works of speculative fiction set in Delhi, this article analyses Basu’s walled city, and those of other contemporary Indian SF writers, against the shifting borders, boundaries and barricades of the city, exploring their potential as sites of radical activism.
{"title":"Borders, Boundaries and Barricades: Speculative Delhis","authors":"Aishwarya Subramanian","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0452","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0452","url":null,"abstract":"In Samit Basu’s SF novel Chosen Spirits (2020), a character offers a cosmology of power within India’s capital city: ‘Delhi has always been a city of seven walls […] You could guess you’d crashed into your wall before, when you couldn’t go further, but now the walls can be mapped and measured, the tools exist.’ Written against the backdrop of India’s discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the protests against it in 2019–20, Chosen Spirits extrapolates a near-future Delhi in which, despite the relative success of the protests, the stark inequalities of caste, class and religion have been reinforced by changes to the city’s geography, and state surveillance increasingly precludes the possibility of working for change. Reading the novel alongside other recent works of speculative fiction set in Delhi, this article analyses Basu’s walled city, and those of other contemporary Indian SF writers, against the shifting borders, boundaries and barricades of the city, exploring their potential as sites of radical activism.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41437070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the work of South African hip-hop artist Yugen Blakrok from an Afrofuturist perspective with a distinct focus on the Gothic, using Mark Fisher’s concept of sonic hauntology. The title of her debut album, The Return of the Astro-Goth (2013), already alludes to this otherworldly dimension in her music. On her second album, Anima Mysterium (2019), Yugen Blakrok delves deeper into the dark abyss of the cosmos and affirms her role as mythic sorceress, which becomes apparent in song titles such as ‘Gorgon Madonna’ and their visualizations as music videos. With the use of a broad set of intertextual references and sampling, and through the merging of various religious attributes from both African and Western traditions, the ancient fuses with the futuristic. The frequent use of Gothic tropes in the lyrics of Yugen Blakrok illustrates a deep interest in the otherworld, the in-between state of dreams, and the question of sound recordings as the haunting voices of the dead. While such contradictions of linear time exemplify Afrofuturism, this article makes a case for combining them with Rammellzee’s concept of Gothic Futurism in order to designate Yugen Blakrok’s unique approach as Astro-Gothic Futurism.
本文从非洲未来主义的角度探讨了南非嘻哈艺术家Yugen Blakrok的作品，并使用了Mark Fisher的声音幽灵学概念，以独特的哥特式为重点。她的首张专辑《The Return of The Astro-Goth》(2013)的名字已经在她的音乐中暗示了这种超凡脱俗的维度。在她的第二张专辑《Anima Mysterium》(2019)中，Yugen Blakrok更深入地探索了宇宙的黑暗深渊，并肯定了她作为神话女巫的角色，这在歌曲的标题中表现得很明显，比如“Gorgon Madonna”和他们的音乐视频的可视化。通过使用广泛的互文参考和采样，并通过融合非洲和西方传统的各种宗教属性，古代与未来融合在一起。在Yugen Blakrok的歌词中频繁使用哥特式比喻，说明了对另一个世界的浓厚兴趣，梦的中间状态，以及录音作为死者挥之不去的声音的问题。虽然线性时间的这种矛盾是非洲未来主义的例证，但本文将其与rammelzee的哥特式未来主义概念结合起来，以将Yugen Blakrok的独特方法称为Astro-Gothic Futurism。
{"title":"The Ascension of the Astro-Goth – Yugen Blakrok’s Otherworldly Hip-Hop Poetics","authors":"Pius Jonas Vögele","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0455","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0455","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the work of South African hip-hop artist Yugen Blakrok from an Afrofuturist perspective with a distinct focus on the Gothic, using Mark Fisher’s concept of sonic hauntology. The title of her debut album, The Return of the Astro-Goth (2013), already alludes to this otherworldly dimension in her music. On her second album, Anima Mysterium (2019), Yugen Blakrok delves deeper into the dark abyss of the cosmos and affirms her role as mythic sorceress, which becomes apparent in song titles such as ‘Gorgon Madonna’ and their visualizations as music videos. With the use of a broad set of intertextual references and sampling, and through the merging of various religious attributes from both African and Western traditions, the ancient fuses with the futuristic. The frequent use of Gothic tropes in the lyrics of Yugen Blakrok illustrates a deep interest in the otherworld, the in-between state of dreams, and the question of sound recordings as the haunting voices of the dead. While such contradictions of linear time exemplify Afrofuturism, this article makes a case for combining them with Rammellzee’s concept of Gothic Futurism in order to designate Yugen Blakrok’s unique approach as Astro-Gothic Futurism.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41709732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy has become more than a work of science fiction. The Dark Forest discourse Liu proposes in the stories has reached beyond the domain of literature, becoming a broader social and cultural phenomenon during China’s historical economic transformations. The Dark Forest has even been dubbed the ‘Bible’ by a group of leading entrepreneurs for its seeming ability to provide inspiration for how people behave and make decisions in a post-socialist modernity developed by market-oriented reforms. This article examines how the Dark Forest metaphor relates to China’s post-socialist transition, where the subject is remade into human capital and where competitive market principles penetrate every social sphere. Through investigating the dehumanizing impulse in the Dark Forest, I will argue that this process of turning people into ‘non-people’ is a literary representation of the process of ‘economization’ in China’s current reality. Building on this point, I will demonstrate that in this Dark Forest only the ‘bestial nature’ of the post-socialist subjects could lead to eventual victory. The popularity of Liu Cixin’s ‘Dark Forest’ theory in China, therefore, provides an important viewpoint through which to perceive the conditions of post-socialist Chinese society.
{"title":"The Dark Forest: The Economized Hunting Ground for Human Capital in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy","authors":"Guangzhao Lyu","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0453","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0453","url":null,"abstract":"Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy has become more than a work of science fiction. The Dark Forest discourse Liu proposes in the stories has reached beyond the domain of literature, becoming a broader social and cultural phenomenon during China’s historical economic transformations. The Dark Forest has even been dubbed the ‘Bible’ by a group of leading entrepreneurs for its seeming ability to provide inspiration for how people behave and make decisions in a post-socialist modernity developed by market-oriented reforms. This article examines how the Dark Forest metaphor relates to China’s post-socialist transition, where the subject is remade into human capital and where competitive market principles penetrate every social sphere. Through investigating the dehumanizing impulse in the Dark Forest, I will argue that this process of turning people into ‘non-people’ is a literary representation of the process of ‘economization’ in China’s current reality. Building on this point, I will demonstrate that in this Dark Forest only the ‘bestial nature’ of the post-socialist subjects could lead to eventual victory. The popularity of Liu Cixin’s ‘Dark Forest’ theory in China, therefore, provides an important viewpoint through which to perceive the conditions of post-socialist Chinese society.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45898786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay considers how two comic books, Nalo Hopkinson’s House of Whispers (2018–2020) and Matthew Clarke and Nigel Lynch’s Hardears (2021), use a poetics of salvage to produce visually and textually rich speculative narratives that problematize Eurocentric versions of futurity. My argument is that the comic books conserve and preserve, through salvage, a diverse racial, spatial and historic archive from narratives that constantly remake bodies (human, animal, plant, metaphysical) alongside places and cosmologies within their larger imaginative geographies. They entangle nature, technology and ritual, and give rise to a Caribbean atopia, or what I term as ‘the Caribatopia’, the paradoxical qualities of an unconfined utopia or an inhospitable place marked by unusualness. These comic books by Caribbean creators augment the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the region, allowing these narratives to become allegorical and political sites producing fantastic atopic settings for representations of resistance and worldbuilding in Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic life.
{"title":"‘Uncertain Voyages of Signification’: Salvage Poetics of the Caribatopia","authors":"Cathy Thomas","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0451","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers how two comic books, Nalo Hopkinson’s House of Whispers (2018–2020) and Matthew Clarke and Nigel Lynch’s Hardears (2021), use a poetics of salvage to produce visually and textually rich speculative narratives that problematize Eurocentric versions of futurity. My argument is that the comic books conserve and preserve, through salvage, a diverse racial, spatial and historic archive from narratives that constantly remake bodies (human, animal, plant, metaphysical) alongside places and cosmologies within their larger imaginative geographies. They entangle nature, technology and ritual, and give rise to a Caribbean atopia, or what I term as ‘the Caribatopia’, the paradoxical qualities of an unconfined utopia or an inhospitable place marked by unusualness. These comic books by Caribbean creators augment the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the region, allowing these narratives to become allegorical and political sites producing fantastic atopic settings for representations of resistance and worldbuilding in Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic life.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46307239","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science fiction written specifically for young readers has had difficulty in establishing itself as a separate genre from fantasy, especially since there is a blurred notion of what constitutes fantasy vis-a-vis science fiction in children’s literature. This difficulty is reflected in the stumbling development of children’s and YA science fiction compared to the relatively clear development of children’s and YA fantasy. As such, trying to define what science fiction for young readers is takes on a malleable, inconsistent quality compared to the more established megatexts of science fiction for adult readers. It is through these unstable definitions of science fiction for adolescents that this essay examines how selected stories from the 2016 anthology Science Fiction: Filipino Fiction for Young Adults, the first anthology of Philippine sf writing that caters directly for a young adult audience, negotiate the genre definitions of ‘science fiction’ and ‘young adult’ for a non-Western audience. Studying how these imagined futures represent the experiences of young non-Western readers who have otherwise been excluded from YA science fiction reveals how the genre can widen and expand its parameters.
{"title":"Past Selves, Future Worlds: Folklore and Futurisms in Science Fiction: Filipino Fiction for Young Adults","authors":"Gabriela Lee","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0456","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0456","url":null,"abstract":"Science fiction written specifically for young readers has had difficulty in establishing itself as a separate genre from fantasy, especially since there is a blurred notion of what constitutes fantasy vis-a-vis science fiction in children’s literature. This difficulty is reflected in the stumbling development of children’s and YA science fiction compared to the relatively clear development of children’s and YA fantasy. As such, trying to define what science fiction for young readers is takes on a malleable, inconsistent quality compared to the more established megatexts of science fiction for adult readers. It is through these unstable definitions of science fiction for adolescents that this essay examines how selected stories from the 2016 anthology Science Fiction: Filipino Fiction for Young Adults, the first anthology of Philippine sf writing that caters directly for a young adult audience, negotiate the genre definitions of ‘science fiction’ and ‘young adult’ for a non-Western audience. Studying how these imagined futures represent the experiences of young non-Western readers who have otherwise been excluded from YA science fiction reveals how the genre can widen and expand its parameters.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45661494","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores two tales of future ruination from the collection Iraq+100 (2016): Diaa Jubaili’s ‘The Worker’ and Hassan Blasim’s ‘The Gardens of Babylon’. These stories, contained in what has been described as ‘the first anthology of science fiction to have emerged from Iraq’, imagine post-oil futures set in the ruins of Iraq’s petroleum industry. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has lamented the fact that the ‘driving beat’ of progress controls us ‘even in tales of ruination’. Here, I argue that reading ruins in these speculative stories anachronistically, through the pre-Islamic poetic tradition of the aṭlāl (which can be translated as ‘remains’ or ‘ruins’), disrupts the driving beat of progress to reveal heterogeneous temporalities and alternative histories. Whereas the poetics of the aṭlāl are traditionally associated with nostalgia, I trace how ruins in Iraq+100 induce states of ‘solastalgia’, a neologism coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to describe the existential distress caused by environmental changes. I conclude that the aṭlāl topos is a renewable poetic and political resource which illuminates alternative rhythms of ruination through an ancestral narrative syntax and, when read in this anachronistic mode, exposes changing dynamics in the nature/culture dialectic across centuries.
{"title":"Ruins of the Future: On the Possibility of Life in the Aṭlāl","authors":"Annie Webster","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0454","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores two tales of future ruination from the collection Iraq+100 (2016): Diaa Jubaili’s ‘The Worker’ and Hassan Blasim’s ‘The Gardens of Babylon’. These stories, contained in what has been described as ‘the first anthology of science fiction to have emerged from Iraq’, imagine post-oil futures set in the ruins of Iraq’s petroleum industry. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has lamented the fact that the ‘driving beat’ of progress controls us ‘even in tales of ruination’. Here, I argue that reading ruins in these speculative stories anachronistically, through the pre-Islamic poetic tradition of the aṭlāl (which can be translated as ‘remains’ or ‘ruins’), disrupts the driving beat of progress to reveal heterogeneous temporalities and alternative histories. Whereas the poetics of the aṭlāl are traditionally associated with nostalgia, I trace how ruins in Iraq+100 induce states of ‘solastalgia’, a neologism coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to describe the existential distress caused by environmental changes. I conclude that the aṭlāl topos is a renewable poetic and political resource which illuminates alternative rhythms of ruination through an ancestral narrative syntax and, when read in this anachronistic mode, exposes changing dynamics in the nature/culture dialectic across centuries.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43113279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Oil spills in the Niger Delta have been at the centre of both legal and literary imaginings as among the most acute examples of modern environmental degradation. In her novel Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor responds to what Rob Nixon describes as the ‘slow violence’ inflicted by the oil industry on non-human persons. This article will cast the study of law and literature into the future and show how the speculative jurisdiction of Okorafor's africanfuturist writing provides an ‘alternative discourse’ to legal scholarship and identifies the accordance of legal personhood as a tool with which to build back towards Lagoon's ‘radical futurity’ of posthuman rights and protection.
{"title":"‘Poison Rainbows’: The Speculative Jurisdiction of Okorafor's Lagoon","authors":"Tabea Wilkes","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0450","url":null,"abstract":"Oil spills in the Niger Delta have been at the centre of both legal and literary imaginings as among the most acute examples of modern environmental degradation. In her novel Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor responds to what Rob Nixon describes as the ‘slow violence’ inflicted by the oil industry on non-human persons. This article will cast the study of law and literature into the future and show how the speculative jurisdiction of Okorafor's africanfuturist writing provides an ‘alternative discourse’ to legal scholarship and identifies the accordance of legal personhood as a tool with which to build back towards Lagoon's ‘radical futurity’ of posthuman rights and protection.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48878408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Perhaps where it is least expected in the literary arts – within a book for children about Virginia Woolf and her sister – the linguistic and visual narrative highlights a therapeutic, bioaesthetic power that is fundamentally nonhuman and trans-species. Virginia and Vanessa, the ‘Bloomsberry’ sisters in this text, undertake a shared creative practice and enlivenment that is creatural, intimate, wolfy, and filled with eco-aesthetic intensities. The story’s theme of a re-vitalizing capacity to become artistic highlights the nomadic and distalic, and the sisters engage with shared cosmic, earth, and animal shapes, sounds, colours and forces. The recuperative efforts imagined for these famous modernist sisters dwell in female relationality, but the text also acknowledges the vulnerability of living ‘on the cracks of life’, an acknowledgment Braidotti insists must remain part of the healthy life that recognizes and connects to pain, even as it works toward an affirmative ethics of biopower.
{"title":"Wolves Like to Wander Around: Nomadic, Distal, and Unfurling Forces in Maclear and Arsenault's Virginia Wolf","authors":"Carrie Rohman","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2022.0442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2022.0442","url":null,"abstract":"Perhaps where it is least expected in the literary arts – within a book for children about Virginia Woolf and her sister – the linguistic and visual narrative highlights a therapeutic, bioaesthetic power that is fundamentally nonhuman and trans-species. Virginia and Vanessa, the ‘Bloomsberry’ sisters in this text, undertake a shared creative practice and enlivenment that is creatural, intimate, wolfy, and filled with eco-aesthetic intensities. The story’s theme of a re-vitalizing capacity to become artistic highlights the nomadic and distalic, and the sisters engage with shared cosmic, earth, and animal shapes, sounds, colours and forces. The recuperative efforts imagined for these famous modernist sisters dwell in female relationality, but the text also acknowledges the vulnerability of living ‘on the cracks of life’, an acknowledgment Braidotti insists must remain part of the healthy life that recognizes and connects to pain, even as it works toward an affirmative ethics of biopower.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47814682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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