Radical Futurisms


Book Description

What comes after end-of-world narratives: visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing. There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end—of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a healthy planet, of the Holocene, of civilization as we know it. Drawing on radical futurisms and visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed—Indigenous, African-American, multispecies, anti-capitalist—as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements, in this book. T. J. Demos poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives, arguing that it's as vital to defeat fatalistic nihilism as the false solutions of green capitalism and algorithmic governance. How might we decolonize the future, and cultivate an emancipated chronopolitics in relation to an undetermined not-yet? If we are to avoid climate emergency's cooptation by technofixes, and the defuturing of multitudes by xenophobic eco-fascism, Demos argues, we must cultivate visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.




Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction


Book Description

In this vibrant and approachable book, award-winning writers of black speculative fiction bring together excerpts from their work and creative reflections on futurisms with original essays. Features an introduction by Suyi Okungbowa. Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction showcases creative-critical essays that negotiate genre bending and black speculative fiction with writerly practice. As Afrodecendant peoples with lived experience from the continent, award-winning authors use their intrinsic voices in critical conversations on Afrofuturism and Afro-centered futurisms. By engaging with difference, they present a new kind of African study that is an evaluative gaze at African history, African spirituality, Afrosurrealism, "becoming," black radical imagination, cultural identity, decolonizing queerness, myths, linguistic cosmologies, and more. Contributing authors – Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, Cheryl S. Ntumy, Dilman Dila, Eugen Bacon, Nerine Dorman, Nuzo Onoh, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Stephen Embleton, Suyi Okungbowa, Tobi Ogundiran and Xan van Rooyen – offer boldly hybrid chapters (both creative and scholarly) that interface Afrocentric artefacts and exegesis. Through ethnographic reflections and intense scrutinies of African fiction, these writers contribute open and diverse reflections of Afro-centered futurisms. The authors in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction feature in major genre and literary awards, including the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Locus, Ignyte, Nommo, Philip K. Dick, Shirley Jackson and Otherwise Awards, among others. They are also intrinsic partners in a vital conversation on the rise of black speculative fiction that explores diversity and social (in)justice, charting poignant stories with black hero/ines who remake their worlds in color zones of their own image.




Dismantling the Nation


Book Description

The first academic volume to theorize and historicize contemporary artistic practices and culture from Chile in the English language, Dismantling the Nation takes as its point of departure a radical criticism against the nation-state of Chile and its colonial, capitalist, heteronormative, and extractivist rule, proposing otherwise forms of inhabiting, creating, and relating in a more fluid, contingent, ecocritical, feminist, and caring worlds. From the case of Chile, the book expands the scholarly discussion around decolonial methodologies, attending to artistic practices and discourses from distinct and distant locations-from Arica and the Atacama Desert to Wallmapu and Tierra del Fuego, and from the Central Valley, the Pacific coast, and the Andes to territories beyond the nation's modern geographical borders. Analyzing how these practices refer to issues such as the environmental and cultural impact of extractivism, as well as memory, trauma, collectivity, and resistance towards neoliberal totality, the volume contributes to the fields of art history and visual culture, memory, ethnic, gender, and Indigenous studies, filmmaking, critical geography, and literature in Chile, Latin America, and other regions of the world, envisioning art history and visual culture from a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective.




The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space offers state-of-the-art overview of contemporary social and cultural research on outer space. International in scope, the thirty-eight contributions by over fifty leading researchers and artists across a variety of disciplines and fields of knowledge, present a range of debates and pose key questions about the crafting of futures in relation to outer space. The Handbook is a call to attend more carefully to engagements with outer space, empirically, affectively, and theoretically, while characterizing current research practices and outlining future research agendas. This recalibration opens profound questions of intersectional politics, race, equity, and environmental justice around the contested topics of space exploration and life off-Earth. Among the many themes included in the volume are the various infrastructures, networks and systems that enable and sustain space exploration; space heritage; the ethics of outer space; social and environmental justice; fundamental debates about life in outer space as it pertains to both astrobiology and SETI; the study of scientific communities; the human body and consciousness; Indigenous astronomical systems of Knowledge; contemporary space art; and ongoing critical interventions to overcome the legacies of colonialism and dismantle hegemonic narratives of outer space.




Radical Futurisms


Book Description

What comes after end-of-world narratives: visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing. There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end—of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a healthy planet, of the Holocene, of civilization as we know it. Drawing on radical futurisms and visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed—Indigenous, African-American, multispecies, anti-capitalist—as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements, in this book. T. J. Demos poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives, arguing that it's as vital to defeat fatalistic nihilism as the false solutions of green capitalism and algorithmic governance. How might we decolonize the future, and cultivate an emancipated chronopolitics in relation to an undetermined not-yet? If we are to avoid climate emergency's cooptation by technofixes, and the defuturing of multitudes by xenophobic eco-fascism, Demos argues, we must cultivate visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.




HOPE


Book Description

What is there to hope for today? How does hope manifest itself at a time when a linear understanding of the future, of growing prosperity, security, and progress is canceled? How can hope be thought beyond market-driven forms of worldbuilding? Is there a third approach in which hope as a critical practice opens a path to alternative futures? After Techno Globalization Pandemic and Kingdom of the Ill, HOPE is the third chapter of the long-term project TECHNO HUMANITIES, exploring the urgent questions of what it means to be a global citizen in the present-day dependency between ecology, technology, and economy. HOPE brings together a wide range of artistic positions from different generations that see the end of future as the start of new beginnings and an incentive to validate more circular and re-generative practices as a source of wonder and collective movement.




Deleuze and Futurism


Book Description

This book is an original exploration of Deleuze's dynamic philosophies of space, time and language, bringing Deleuze and futurism together for the first time. Helen Palmer investigates both the potential for creative novelty and the pitfalls of formalism within both futurist and Deleuzian linguistic practices. Through creative and rigorous analyses of Russian and Italian futurist manifestos, the 'futurist' aspects of Deleuze's language and thought are drawn out. The genre of the futurist manifesto is a literary and linguistic model which can be applied to Deleuze's work, not only at times when he writes explicitly in the style of a manifesto but also in his earlier writings such as Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969). The way in which avant-garde manifestos often attempt to perform and demand their aims simultaneously, and the problems which arise due to this, is an operation which can be perceived in Deleuze's writing. With a particular focus on Russian zaum, the book negotiates the philosophy behind futurist 'nonsense' language and how Deleuze propounds analogous goals in The Logic of Sense. This book critically engages with Deleuze's poetics, ultimately suggesting that multiple linguistic models operate synecdochically within his philosophy.




Second Site


Book Description

"In the decades following World War II, artists and designers developed the land art movement, consisting of outdoor artworks that can exist only in a specific place. Major works within this genre include Walter De Maria's Lightning Field (1977) located on an isolated high-desert plain in New Mexico; Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake, the concrete cylinders of Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels (1976), located in the Great Basin Desert in Utah; and other projects that nestle into environments ranging from open fields to concrete cityscapes. These works are typically depicted as they were when originally constructed. Yet their environmental contexts have transformed due to weather, agriculture, climate change, land-use policy, and more. In Second Site, James Nisbet presents the first sustained argument on how to account for the passage of time and environmental change in site-specific artworks, ranging from Richard Serra's Shift (1970)-whose initial small-farm-setting is now a growing exurb of Toronto-to Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch (1974) and Nancy Holt's Dark Star Park (1984). Nisbet argues for an ecological reading of the artworks' environments, and coins the term "second site" to argue that manmade artworks and non-living things have their own durations but co-exist in the continuous experience of an environment. Any single photograph or experience of a site can provide only one view of an ever-changing existence. Nisbet advocates for new methods of evaluation, conservation, and depiction in order to "read" the content of these sites of time. In doing so, he uses site-specific artworks to help understand what it means for humans and their cultural production to live in an ecologically volatile world"--




Futurism


Book Description




Beyond the World's End


Book Description

In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises. Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms. Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in works by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.