The Afrofuturist mythology of Drexciya rewrites violent colonial histories of dispossession, imagining submarine utopias in which the descendants of enslaved Africans live outside colonial orders. With this submersion, the Drexciyan mythos offers creative visions of oceanic futures—the result of climate change. I therefore ask; what might be learned from Drexciyan relations to the Earth? I first probe Drexciyan–Earth relations through Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019), in which Drexciyans espouse a mode of stewardship over the Earth. Taking up a critical problematization of the possibility of relating to an inhuman Earth vastly greater than ourselves, I explore how The Deep navigates the incommensurability between inhuman nature and human/Drexciyan being. I argue that The Deep ’s Drexciyans are constituted across orders of in/non/human matter, an insight I carry over to Ellen Gallagher’s painting Bird in Hand (2006). There, I find a kinship relation with inhuman matter that accommodates the radical incommensurability of the Earth: I articulate this kinship as a transcorporeal mutuality of be(com)ing with the Earth. Whilst recognizing the asymmetry between their own existence and the Earth’s, Drexciyans insist on a difficult kinship with it. Such kinship relations critique Western practices of extractivism, and probe other praxes of inhabiting the Earth.
Drexciya 的非洲未来主义神话改写了暴力剥夺的殖民历史，想象出被奴役非洲人的后裔在殖民秩序之外生活的海底乌托邦。通过这种沉潜，德雷克西娅神话提供了对海洋未来--气候变化的结果--的创造性想象。因此，我要问，从德雷克西扬人与地球的关系中可以学到什么？我首先通过里弗斯-所罗门（Rivers Solomon）的《深海》（The Deep，2019 年）来探究德雷克西扬人与地球的关系，在这部作品中，德雷克西扬人信奉一种管理地球的模式。我对《深渊》中非人类的自然与人类/德雷克西扬人之间的不可通约性进行了探讨。我认为，《深渊》中的德雷克西扬人是在非人类物质和非人类物质之间构成的，我将这一观点延伸到艾伦-加拉格尔（Ellen Gallagher）的画作《手中的鸟》（Bird in Hand，2006 年）中。在那里，我发现了一种与非人类物质的亲缘关系，这种关系容纳了地球的根本不可通约性：我将这种亲缘关系表述为与地球的超肉体互为性。德雷克西雅人认识到自身存在与地球存在之间的不对称，同时坚持与地球建立一种艰难的亲缘关系。这种亲缘关系批判了西方的采掘主义做法，并探究了居住在地球上的其他做法。
{"title":"Inhuman Kinship at Insensible Depths","authors":"Danny Steur","doi":"10.3828/extr.2024.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2024.5","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The Afrofuturist mythology of Drexciya rewrites violent colonial histories of dispossession, imagining submarine utopias in which the descendants of enslaved Africans live outside colonial orders. With this submersion, the Drexciyan mythos offers creative visions of oceanic futures—the result of climate change. I therefore ask; what might be learned from Drexciyan relations to the Earth? I first probe Drexciyan–Earth relations through Rivers Solomon’s\u0000 The Deep\u0000 (2019), in which Drexciyans espouse a mode of stewardship over the Earth. Taking up a critical problematization of the possibility of relating to an inhuman Earth vastly greater than ourselves, I explore how\u0000 The Deep\u0000 navigates the incommensurability between inhuman nature and human/Drexciyan being. I argue that\u0000 The Deep\u0000 ’s Drexciyans are constituted across orders of in/non/human matter, an insight I carry over to Ellen Gallagher’s painting\u0000 Bird in Hand\u0000 (2006). There, I find a kinship relation with inhuman matter that accommodates the radical incommensurability of the Earth: I articulate this kinship as a transcorporeal mutuality of be(com)ing with the Earth. Whilst recognizing the asymmetry between their own existence and the Earth’s, Drexciyans insist on a difficult kinship with it. Such kinship relations critique Western practices of extractivism, and probe other praxes of inhabiting the Earth.\u0000","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140705368","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}
{"title":"Index of Articles and Reviews in Volume 64","authors":"","doi":"10.3828/extr.2023.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2023.25","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138961067","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}
Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017) imagines a future in which an evolutionary crisis threatens humanity. Bacteria released from melting permafrost have caused fauna to regress to past evolutionary stages, and human beings are either miscarrying or birthing “previous hominins.” Members of the novel’s older (wealthy, white) generation decry the crisis as the end of the aesthetic: “There goes literary fiction!” For them, evolutionary atavism can only lead to stunted artistic projects. Erdrich’s protagonist, Cedar, a newly pregnant Ojibwe woman, believes that her pregnancy with a likely nonhuman child portends not the end of the world but a fruitful new beginning for forms of life—and, by extension—forms of art. This paper considers how and why Erdrich depicts the baby as allegorizing the aesthetic, tying the future of the (non)human to the future of the literary. Throughout, Erdrich portrays Cedar’s pregnancy as linked to her handwriting the epistolary novel. Her body is also described as having been “coded” with long-forgotten evolutionary information. Pregnancy, in the novel, is presented as haphazardly salvaging something biologically valuable from the past and repurposing it for the future. Central to this paper is the argument that Erdrich’s novel formally mimics the biological recycling she thematizes, positing altered forms of disorderly, literary beauty for a nonhuman (and notably nonwhite, anticapitalistic) future.
{"title":"The Design Unraveling","authors":"Elisa Faison","doi":"10.3828/extr.2023.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2023.22","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Louise Erdrich’s\u0000 Future Home of the Living God\u0000 (2017) imagines a future in which an evolutionary crisis threatens humanity. Bacteria released from melting permafrost have caused fauna to regress to past evolutionary stages, and human beings are either miscarrying or birthing “previous hominins.” Members of the novel’s older (wealthy, white) generation decry the crisis as the end of the aesthetic: “There goes literary fiction!” For them, evolutionary atavism can only lead to stunted artistic projects. Erdrich’s protagonist, Cedar, a newly pregnant Ojibwe woman, believes that her pregnancy with a likely nonhuman child portends not the end of the world but a fruitful new beginning for forms of life—and, by extension—forms of art. This paper considers how and why Erdrich depicts the baby as allegorizing the aesthetic, tying the future of the (non)human to the future of the literary. Throughout, Erdrich portrays Cedar’s pregnancy as linked to her handwriting the epistolary novel. Her body is also described as having been “coded” with long-forgotten evolutionary information. Pregnancy, in the novel, is presented as haphazardly salvaging something biologically valuable from the past and repurposing it for the future. Central to this paper is the argument that Erdrich’s novel formally mimics the biological recycling she thematizes, positing altered forms of disorderly, literary beauty for a nonhuman (and notably nonwhite, anticapitalistic) future.\u0000","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138959284","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}
Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland (2021) can be read as a Gothic novel about Black trauma, and while this is certainly true, such an assessment overlooks its anarchist dimension and emancipatory potential. As articulated by Solomon, Black anarchism overcomes the limitations of white, European anarchism from within by contesting its attachment to the dualisms of modernity: as in New Materialist philosophies, the boundaries between human and nonhuman, and living and dead matter, are blurred. Through its queer Black protagonist, Vern, and her alliance with her Indigenous lover, Gogo, Sorrowland attacks the modernist drive to classify everything into strict dichotomies—a process which inevitably also seeks racial and sexual “purity.”
{"title":"“Vile Matter”","authors":"Jesse Cohn","doi":"10.3828/extr.2023.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2023.19","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Rivers Solomon’s\u0000 Sorrowland\u0000 (2021) can be read as a Gothic novel about Black trauma, and while this is certainly true, such an assessment overlooks its anarchist dimension and emancipatory potential. As articulated by Solomon, Black anarchism overcomes the limitations of white, European anarchism from within by contesting its attachment to the dualisms of modernity: as in New Materialist philosophies, the boundaries between human and nonhuman, and living and dead matter, are blurred. Through its queer Black protagonist, Vern, and her alliance with her Indigenous lover, Gogo,\u0000 Sorrowland\u0000 attacks the modernist drive to classify everything into strict dichotomies—a process which inevitably also seeks racial and sexual “purity.”\u0000","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138959576","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}
{"title":"Toward a Metaphysics of Relinquishment: Sf, Posthumanism, New Materialism","authors":"John Landreville, Tony M. Vinci","doi":"10.3828/extr.2023.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2023.17","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138959351","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 paper offers a queer ecological reading of the 2012 video game Dear Esther , an approach which exists at the intersection of queer theory, queer ecology, and video game scholarship. Queer theory working in concert with ecological thought traces the affinities between human, geological, animal, and atmospheric forces within the game; these affinities compound and trouble categorical distnctions, instantiating a porous “time-space where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment,’” anchoring “complex modes of analysis that travel through entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual” (Alaimo, “Trans-Corporeal” 238). Dear Esther enacts a series of immanent encounters with more-than-human material entanglements, revealing a world “waterlogged” by fluid slippages between body and island, feather and flesh, and bones and stones to offer, ultimately, a contribution to the nascent field of queer video game scholarship that makes a case for video games as a media uniquely capable of disclosing fluid, dynamic, and complex relations between human and nonhuman matter and environment (Pinchbeck and Briscoe).
{"title":"“I’m Traversing My Own Death Throes”","authors":"Kaitlin Moore","doi":"10.3828/extr.2023.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2023.20","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper offers a queer ecological reading of the 2012 video game\u0000 Dear Esther\u0000 , an approach which exists at the intersection of queer theory, queer ecology, and video game scholarship. Queer theory working in concert with ecological thought traces the affinities between human, geological, animal, and atmospheric forces within the game; these affinities compound and trouble categorical distnctions, instantiating a porous “time-space where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment,’” anchoring “complex modes of analysis that travel through entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual” (Alaimo, “Trans-Corporeal” 238).\u0000 Dear Esther\u0000 enacts a series of immanent encounters with more-than-human material entanglements, revealing a world “waterlogged” by fluid slippages between body and island, feather and flesh, and bones and stones to offer, ultimately, a contribution to the nascent field of queer video game scholarship that makes a case for video games as a media uniquely capable of disclosing fluid, dynamic, and complex relations between human and nonhuman matter and environment (Pinchbeck and Briscoe).\u0000","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138959870","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 introduces recent speculative novels written by Finnish authors and discusses the vegetal agency that permeates them. In Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun (2013; translated 2016) and Emmi Itäranta’s The Moonday Letters (2020; translated 2022), plant life entices, intoxicates, and transforms human bodies and minds. Sinisalo experiments with ideas about the coevolution of plants and humans, and Itäranta explores the significance of plants in the contexts of space colonies and ecosabotage. The essay suggests that the novels gesture toward an emerging Planthroposcene . Anthropologist Natasha Myers has proposed “Planthroposcene” as a modification to Anthropocene, the era of global human impact on the Earth. As an “aspirational episteme,” the Planthroposcene considers plants as allies and teachers, and invites researchers and artists to develop ways of “conspiring” with them. While the Planthroposcene invites humans to align themselves with plant life in mutually beneficial relationships, contemporary Finnish speculative fiction suggests that such relationships are not fluid extensions of knowledge, but can also be strange, disturbing, and even destructive. Drawing on the theoretical view that speculative fiction can challenge readers’ habitual patterns of engaging with their lived environments, and thus give rise to unexpected experiences and non-anthropocentric viewpoints, the essay develops the notion of embodied estrangement . Discussing ambivalent plant–human relations demonstrates how the notion of embodied estrangement can contribute to science fiction studies as well as to more-than-human methodologies in literary studies.
{"title":"Breathing with Seagrass","authors":"Kaisa Kortekallio","doi":"10.3828/extr.2023.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2023.21","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay introduces recent speculative novels written by Finnish authors and discusses the vegetal agency that permeates them. In Johanna Sinisalo’s\u0000 The Core of the Sun\u0000 (2013; translated 2016) and Emmi Itäranta’s\u0000 The Moonday Letters\u0000 (2020; translated 2022), plant life entices, intoxicates, and transforms human bodies and minds. Sinisalo experiments with ideas about the coevolution of plants and humans, and Itäranta explores the significance of plants in the contexts of space colonies and ecosabotage. The essay suggests that the novels gesture toward an emerging\u0000 Planthroposcene\u0000 . Anthropologist Natasha Myers has proposed “Planthroposcene” as a modification to Anthropocene, the era of global human impact on the Earth. As an “aspirational episteme,” the Planthroposcene considers plants as allies and teachers, and invites researchers and artists to develop ways of “conspiring” with them. While the Planthroposcene invites humans to align themselves with plant life in mutually beneficial relationships, contemporary Finnish speculative fiction suggests that such relationships are not fluid extensions of knowledge, but can also be strange, disturbing, and even destructive. Drawing on the theoretical view that speculative fiction can challenge readers’ habitual patterns of engaging with their lived environments, and thus give rise to unexpected experiences and non-anthropocentric viewpoints, the essay develops the notion of\u0000 embodied estrangement\u0000 . Discussing ambivalent plant–human relations demonstrates how the notion of embodied estrangement can contribute to science fiction studies as well as to more-than-human methodologies in literary studies.\u0000","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138961046","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}
Jeff VanderMeer’s The Strange Bird (2018) fuses speculative fiction’s project of cognitive estrangement with sentimental literature’s project of dispersing ethically charged affective experience. The resulting mode of narrative, what I term posthumanist sentimentality, estranges readers from established forms of both thought and feeling, opening them to models of care that operate in more-than-human worlds. Entangling the traumatic account of the eponymous posthuman creature with the romantic history of the humans who made her, The Strange Bird highlights both the dangers of anthropocentrism and the values of radical ontological vulnerability when learning to witness for and with posthuman and post-traumatic subjects.
{"title":"Posthumanist Sentimentality","authors":"Tony M. Vinci","doi":"10.3828/extr.2023.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2023.23","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Jeff VanderMeer’s\u0000 The Strange Bird\u0000 (2018) fuses speculative fiction’s project of cognitive estrangement with sentimental literature’s project of dispersing ethically charged affective experience. The resulting mode of narrative, what I term posthumanist sentimentality, estranges readers from established forms of both thought and feeling, opening them to models of care that operate in more-than-human worlds. Entangling the traumatic account of the eponymous posthuman creature with the romantic history of the humans who made her,\u0000 The Strange Bird\u0000 highlights both the dangers of anthropocentrism and the values of radical ontological vulnerability when learning to witness for and with posthuman and post-traumatic subjects.\u0000","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138961781","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}
Chinese science fiction writer Han Song’s novel Red Ocean (2004) presents a future world in which humans utilize technology to transform into aquatic incarnations of themselves, in order to adapt to the collapsing ecosystems around them. This paper argues that Han’s novel constructs a transcultural “aquatic posthumanism” that is situated at the intersection of what Zygmunt Bauman terms “liquid modernity” (3) and the Daoist notion of “liquid vitality” (Miller 44). While the emergence of “liquid modernity” delivers a promise that a technological boom leads to a world that promotes open communication and swift action, a world without borders, it actually reinforces further invisible barriers between people, as well as between the human and the more-than-human world. Han’s conceptualization of aquatic posthumanism challenges a version of techno-determinist transhumanism, elevating the ecological theme of Red Ocean to the level of Daoist ecology in an effort to provoke an agile and adaptable form of resistance to anthropocentrism.
{"title":"Towards a Daoist Futurity","authors":"Mia Chen Ma","doi":"10.3828/extr.2023.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2023.18","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Chinese science fiction writer Han Song’s novel\u0000 Red Ocean\u0000 (2004) presents a future world in which humans utilize technology to transform into aquatic incarnations of themselves, in order to adapt to the collapsing ecosystems around them. This paper argues that Han’s novel constructs a transcultural “aquatic posthumanism” that is situated at the intersection of what Zygmunt Bauman terms “liquid modernity” (3) and the Daoist notion of “liquid vitality” (Miller 44). While the emergence of “liquid modernity” delivers a promise that a technological boom leads to a world that promotes open communication and swift action, a world without borders, it actually reinforces further invisible barriers between people, as well as between the human and the more-than-human world. Han’s conceptualization of aquatic posthumanism challenges a version of techno-determinist transhumanism, elevating the ecological theme of\u0000 Red Ocean\u0000 to the level of Daoist ecology in an effort to provoke an agile and adaptable form of resistance to anthropocentrism.\u0000","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138962325","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}
{"title":"Violence, the Humanness of Things, and the Thingness of Humans in Nicoletta Vallorani’s\u0000 Avrai i miei occhi","authors":"E. Baldi","doi":"10.3828/extr.2023.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2023.14","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45765851","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：