ABSTRACT:This article examines the frequent appearance of cannibalism in works of environmentally oriented speculative fiction, including Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993), Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), Agustina Bazterrica's Tender is the Flesh (2020), and Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (2013). Here, cannibalism is demonstrated to be more than a disturbing alimentary anxiety that lends aesthetic "shock value" to contemporary narratives of future ecological collapse and political catastrophe. Rather, the problem of people eating people serves as a proxy for a more difficult—and more conceptually nuanced—conversation about the very viability of political hope in a world defined by metastasizing environmental crises. Specifically, this article demonstrates that although works of Anthropocene fiction frequently use the specter of environmental disaster to leverage critiques of racialized capitalism, the political agenda of these novels and films is often tacitly undermined by depictions of cannibalism that frame anthropophagy as an irredeemable moral failing that cannot be explained away as the result of either neoliberal economics or the white supremacy that sustains such a system.
摘要：本文考察了以环境为导向的推理小说作品中食人现象的频繁出现，包括奥克塔维亚·E·巴特勒（Octavia E.Butler）的《播种者寓言》（Parable of the Sower）（1993年）、科马克·麦卡锡（Cormac McCarthy。在这里，食人被证明不仅仅是一种令人不安的消化焦虑，它为当代关于未来生态崩溃和政治灾难的叙事提供了美学“震撼价值”。相反，人们吃人的问题代表了一场更困难、概念上更微妙的对话，即在一个由不断转移的环境危机定义的世界里，政治希望的可行性。具体而言，这篇文章表明，尽管人类世小说作品经常利用环境灾难的幽灵来利用对种族化资本主义的批评，这些小说和电影的政治议程往往被食人行为的描述所默认，食人行为将人类吞噬视为一种不可挽回的道德失败，而这种失败既不能解释为新自由主义经济学的结果，也不能解释为维持这种制度的白人至上主义的结果。
{"title":"Cannibal Nihilism: Meat and Meaninglessness in the Anthropocene Imaginary","authors":"T. Harper","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article examines the frequent appearance of cannibalism in works of environmentally oriented speculative fiction, including Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993), Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), Agustina Bazterrica's Tender is the Flesh (2020), and Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (2013). Here, cannibalism is demonstrated to be more than a disturbing alimentary anxiety that lends aesthetic \"shock value\" to contemporary narratives of future ecological collapse and political catastrophe. Rather, the problem of people eating people serves as a proxy for a more difficult—and more conceptually nuanced—conversation about the very viability of political hope in a world defined by metastasizing environmental crises. Specifically, this article demonstrates that although works of Anthropocene fiction frequently use the specter of environmental disaster to leverage critiques of racialized capitalism, the political agenda of these novels and films is often tacitly undermined by depictions of cannibalism that frame anthropophagy as an irredeemable moral failing that cannot be explained away as the result of either neoliberal economics or the white supremacy that sustains such a system.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"304 - 321"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49253132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century Narrative ed. by Sonia Baelo-Allué and Mónica Calvo-Pascual (review)","authors":"J. Lindsay","doi":"10.4324/9781003129813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003129813","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"373 - 376"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49304793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fictions: Narrating the Future ed. by Tereza Dìdinová et al. (review)","authors":"Chris Pak","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0035","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"384 - 388"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45994946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This article draws a connection between closed-biosphere tropes in Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge (1984) and Soviet and American research on closed artificial ecologies. The article contends that during the 1980s, bioregenerative food systems—as research objects and literary tropes—expressed a perception of socialism and capitalism as imperfect yet eternal states. Two challenges are analogized: 1) conceiving political alternatives at the twentieth century's end, and 2) sustaining livable habitats using a closed ecology's limited available resources (for example, by deriving nutrients from waste). Both challenges inspire a mode of aggressive re-use here termed "strategic recycling." To close, the article assesses the ambivalent politics attending biospheric thinking: closed biospheres clarify humans' metabolic enmeshment in their environments, inviting the radical reassessment of organism-environment relations as ratios of useful outputs over required inputs (what one emits over what one eats). The resulting perspective carries both utopian and eugenic implications that make biospheric thinking itself a "recyclable" material that can be conscripted with equal ease into emancipatory and reactionary projects.
{"title":"Cold-War Cabin Ecologies: Soviet-American Biospheric Thinking","authors":"Eliza Rose","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0025","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article draws a connection between closed-biosphere tropes in Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge (1984) and Soviet and American research on closed artificial ecologies. The article contends that during the 1980s, bioregenerative food systems—as research objects and literary tropes—expressed a perception of socialism and capitalism as imperfect yet eternal states. Two challenges are analogized: 1) conceiving political alternatives at the twentieth century's end, and 2) sustaining livable habitats using a closed ecology's limited available resources (for example, by deriving nutrients from waste). Both challenges inspire a mode of aggressive re-use here termed \"strategic recycling.\" To close, the article assesses the ambivalent politics attending biospheric thinking: closed biospheres clarify humans' metabolic enmeshment in their environments, inviting the radical reassessment of organism-environment relations as ratios of useful outputs over required inputs (what one emits over what one eats). The resulting perspective carries both utopian and eugenic implications that make biospheric thinking itself a \"recyclable\" material that can be conscripted with equal ease into emancipatory and reactionary projects.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"267 - 287"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43388205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This article examines the connection between Caribbean foodways and the varieties of speculative fiction that have emerged from the region. My contention is that Caribbean sf not only draws attention to the baleful impact of capitalist imperialism on agro-ecologies and food cultures, but can also have a special role in catalyzing opposition to it. I examine some of the ways in which Caribbean writers have used sf and, more particularly, Afrofuturist forms to dramatize the bloody history of plantation agriculture, conflicts over land use, and popular resistance to imposed food cultures. Focusing on novels by Anthony Joseph, Erna Brodber, and Diana McCaulay, I explore how their aesthetics of estrangement sensitize readers to the stakes involved in the struggle between food dependency and food sovereignty. Against a backdrop of accelerating climate breakdown, new rounds of imperialist plunder, and the ongoing colonization of eating habits, all three authors draw on the legacy of the plot system to envision emancipatory food futures.
{"title":"Plotting the Future in Caribbean SF: Alimentary Imperialism and Horti(counter)culture","authors":"M. Niblett","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article examines the connection between Caribbean foodways and the varieties of speculative fiction that have emerged from the region. My contention is that Caribbean sf not only draws attention to the baleful impact of capitalist imperialism on agro-ecologies and food cultures, but can also have a special role in catalyzing opposition to it. I examine some of the ways in which Caribbean writers have used sf and, more particularly, Afrofuturist forms to dramatize the bloody history of plantation agriculture, conflicts over land use, and popular resistance to imposed food cultures. Focusing on novels by Anthony Joseph, Erna Brodber, and Diana McCaulay, I explore how their aesthetics of estrangement sensitize readers to the stakes involved in the struggle between food dependency and food sovereignty. Against a backdrop of accelerating climate breakdown, new rounds of imperialist plunder, and the ongoing colonization of eating habits, all three authors draw on the legacy of the plot system to envision emancipatory food futures.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"288 - 303"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45563994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction by M. Elizabeth Ginway (review)","authors":"Andrea L. L. Bell","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0038","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"396 - 399"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41313549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"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：