#128 = Volume 43, Part 1 = March 2016
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
Sawyer Seminar on Alternative Futurisms at UC Riverside. This fall marked the beginning of the year-long Alternative Futurisms John E. Sawyer seminars being held at the University of California at Riverside. These events are made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The intent of the conference series is to create a forum for scholars, writers, and artists from various ethnic studies areas to interrogate ethnic identity and futuristic speculation. The Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Program hosted a two-day conference to launch the Sawyer events, entitled Revising the Past, Remaking the Future. In the keynote address “The Forbidden Zone: Race, Genre, and the American Science Fiction Film,” Barry Keith Grant (Brock University) discussed the problematic depiction of race in sf cinema. Also of note were panels on retrofuturism, temporalities and utopianism, Mexican sf, racial genetics in sf, and Native American science in Indigenous sf. (For the schedule of winter quarter events, audio from several fall events, abstracts, and more information, see sawyer.ucr.edu).
Three of the fall events were particularly noteworthy. The first event was a panel on Asian American Speculative Fiction, which was moderated by Stephen Sohn (UC Riverside). Sohn discussed how techno-orientalism is pervasive in mainstream sf but also in subgenres such as cyberpunk. This is the problematic environment, he explained, engaged by Asian American writers of speculative fiction, such as Ted Chiang. In addition to engaging the racial tropes of mainstream sf, Sohn argued that Chiang's work, along with Asian American young adult sf, explores the social dimensions of the Asian and Asian American experience. Christopher Fan (UC Berkeley) played a clip of an Asian man who manufactures eyes for the human replicants from Blade Runner as an example of one of the many instances of the techno-orientalist ways that mainstream sf depicts Asian American people. Fan continued by providing an overview of Asian American speculative fiction before the 1990s. This overview included writers overlooked by the critical tradition, such as Lawrence Yep and William F. Woo. The Asian American speculative fiction genre, Fan explained, expands to at least 65 Asian American writers after Ted Chiang’s “Tower of Babylon” won the 1991 Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Traise Yamamoto (UC Riverside) tentatively proposed that all Asian American literature could be seen as speculative and more specifically as science fiction. She argued for reading Asian American literature as sf in part because the sf genre raises questions about the problematic limits of realism through its exploration of issues such as immigration and war. She then moved to look at how Asian American literature has shifted to genre fiction, citing Charles Yu’s “Standard Loneliness Package” (2010) and Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” (1998), among other examples. Rachel C. Lee (UCLA) explained that her work exploring issues in Asian American literature such as time, narrative, race, reproduction, militarized informatics, and agricultural chemistry are topics also shared by sf. She argued, like Yamamoto, that science fiction has been integral to canonical Asian American literature. Lee qualified this claim by stating that this is the case at least since the 1970s with the publication of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1975). She posited that intergenerational conflict was the reason for the greater incorporation of genre fiction into Asian American fiction.
The second event was a panel on African diasporic speculative fiction moderated by Taylor Evans (UC Riverside). Adilifu Nama (Loyola Marymount University) argued for the use of the term astro-blackness to focus on the fact that African American cultural productions, including those in the genre of speculative fiction, are marginalized—or relegated to an outer space. He also noted the importance of analyzing afrofuturism in relation to real black political struggles. Further, he claimed that the very existence of futuristic depictions of blackness is a political statement. Donatella Galella (UC Riverside) discussed how speculative musical theater constructs social justice through its use of race. She analyzed how blackness operates in two musicals, The Fortress of Solitude (2012) and Hamilton (2015), playing clips from both productions. Galella argued that while the first musical confronts the racial dynamics of power with its superhero themes, the second avoids the reality of racialized power dynamics in its zeal to provide colorblind casting in the story of the US’s founding politicians. Sara Kaplan (UC San Diego) argued that African diasporic speculative fiction has the potential to open up new and radical ways of understanding temporal and spatial notions of freedom. She claimed that blackness itself is speculative and that attempts to control black reproduction led to the formation of our concepts of the future. Erica Edwards (UC Riverside) argued that the post-racial trope of the mixed-race woman as both promise and threat is critiqued in Danzy Senna’s “The Land of Beulah” (2011). Edwards explained that the story does so by depicting Jackie, a mixed-race woman, and her relationship with a canine mutt. The story, she maintained, illustrates the similarities between the discourses of miscegenation and pedigree.
The third event was a public reading by Blackfeet sf and horror author Stephen Graham Jones. Jones read selections of flash fiction such as “Truth is a Bearded Lady,” about a man with two hearts; “How to Know You're a Killer,” which is narrated in the second person, and “Kiss the Chef” about retaliatory and unsanitary party hosts. He also read short stories such as “Love is a Cavity I Can't Start Touching,” about teenagers experimenting with cannibalism, and a slasher story titled “Dear Final Girls.”
The Sawyer events during the fall quarter also included a seminar talk with John Rieder, author of Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008), a panel on settler colonial theory and speculative fiction with David Lloyd (UC Riverside), John Rieder (University of Hawaii-Manoa), Grace Dillon (Portland State University), Michelle Raheja (UC Riverside), and Brian K. Hudson (UC Riverside), as well as screenings and discussions of Generation Last by Latino director Joel Juarez, El Incidente and Los Parecidos by Latino director Isaac Ezban, and The 6th World by Navaho director Nanobah Becker.—Brian Hudson, University of California, Riverside
Radical Politics, Recent Exhibitions, and Utopianism Now. 2003 saw the first appearance of Utopia Station curated by Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Rirkrit Tiravanija at the Venice Biennale. The latest in a series of gatherings designed to create connections, explore tensions, and foster discussions about the idea of utopia, it was the most concrete (the most exhibition-like, the most constructed) to date. It was large, containing works by more than 60 individual artists, architects, and artists’ groups, along with posters by another 100, but was nonetheless conceptualized as unfinished: a way-station rather than a destination, utopia as a catalyst—or as fuel—rather than a plan. Along with the art works, there were events, performances, and talks, all geared to facilitate and inspire discussion and creation investigating the direction of utopia.
In 2015, curating is by now an established big business—superstar curators such as Obrist are seemingly everywhere, and academic work on curating has spawned entire courses dedicated to understanding the phenomenon. And, curiously for a topic that has seen little overt traction in literature or film since the counter-culture years (with some honorable exceptions, particularly for readers of Kim Stanley Robinson), utopianism is a popular organizing topic for curated exhibitions. Are we witnessing the rise of something genuinely new and interesting in utopian thought? If curatorial practice, as Fredric Jameson has claimed, is a reflection of the contemporary logic of global financialized capitalism (“The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review 92 [2015]: 101-32), does this mean it is incapable of genuine utopian critique, or perfectly positioned for it?
Two of the most significant curated exhibitions with a utopian/dystopian focus in 2015 were Banksy’s media-phenomenon Dismaland and Penny Woolcock’s Utopia at the Roundhouse. They are very different beasts, but to look at them side-by-side is not only more enlightening than considering them separately but also borrows a little from the curatorial technique that animates both.
The day I went to see Banksy’s Dismaland the universe had arranged a perfect context for the exhibition. I stood in the rain outside for two hours, queuing with a couple of hundred others under the dilapidated gothic parody of a Disneyland sign. It was slow and miserable, but, in defiance, the crowd around me were in high spirits. People were excited to see the show—Banksy’s brand seemed to them to promise something good—and I spoke to a few who were sure that it would “give them something to think about.” While the exhibition proper was housed in the long-closed lido on the seafront of Weston-Super-Mare (a British seaside town fittingly redolent of faded glories), it also extended its boundaries beyond its walls, into a fuzzy fringe that starts with buying tickets at the head of the queue from staff trained to be surly to complete the full Dismaland experience. The entrance boasts the first full artwork, a fake security checkpoint with ersatz metal detectors and comedy objects supposedly pulled from the bags of visitors. Then, on into the main space itself, the open arena at the center hosts, amongst other things, a full-size, broken-down Disney castle in a lake that has little turds floating in it; a Ferris-wheel; a police water cannon serving as a fountain; a giant pair of twisted transport trucks; and a large killer whale jumping out of a toilet and through a hoop. It is certainly dismal. The floor is muddy and cracked, there are puddles everywhere, and the soggy, half-burnt remains of a oftlinewood fire feel emblematic of the general miasma. To the left are large warehouse rooms holding more traditional canvas arts—the derisive Disney theme is prevalent —as well as Banksy’s own full-size construction of Death riding a dodgems car to disco music, though the audience must stand and watch, not join in. We have a fetus branded all over with logos; we find clashings of consumerism and nature, such as photos of a turnstile set in the middle of wilderness, reminding the reviewer of Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” (1919), or the detritus of human civilization amongst running animals. Tensions between soft and hard, natural and human, cartoon whimsy and grim realism are prominent: Damien Hirst floats a beach ball with a fan above large blades set in the floor; black and white landscapes of lumberjacks at work bleed red from the severed trunks; a Muppet drives a pick-up overflowing with generic African mercenaries; a car door is punched with holes and crocheted with a flower pattern. In the final room stands a large, small-scale model of a town, frozen in a moment after some up-swell of civil unrest, and flooded with tiny policemen, tiny flashing lights, tiny emergency vehicles.
Back outside, bleak humor about the capitalist condition dominates the short films screening at the outdoor cinema, while scattered fairground attractions include a caravan that creates the illusion of spinning without moving; a pool in which you can drive remote-control boats stuffed with refugees or migrants and which sports a few floating bodies as macabre garnish; or David Shrigley’s stall where you compete to knock an anvil off a pillar with ping-pong balls (and fail, inevitably, and are rewarded with a rubber bracelet à la those charity bracelets so popular a while ago, labelled “Meaningless Rubber Bracelet”). Finally, there’s the centerpiece. You enter the castle, are plunged into darkness, and find yourself in a cavernous space lit by the flashing of photo bulbs. In the middle is an overturned pumpkin carriage, spilling a dead Cinderella from the window. To the left is a pair of mangled horses. The whole thing is a touch larger than life-size, modeled in some shiny plastic material and surrounded by paparazzi, the source of the flashing. You stand, and gape, and the effect is striking. As you leave through the back, a photo stand sells pictures of you standing and gaping, side by side with the paparazzi—part, we realize, of the problem.
Perhaps all this sounds interesting, and this reviewer is, at least, glad he went. But there was something wrong here. The whole exhibition was oddly flat—affectless and platitudinous. It took aim at the dystopian present but missed and hit instead the ballooning, clownish, cartoonish figures that populate our world and comprise our fantasies. To pull the carpet merely from under Disneyfication feels trite. To place Mickey Mouse and apocalypse, the Muppets and mercenaries, or Cinderella and shit in the same frame perhaps attempts to make clear the way in which such garish fantasies paper over grim realities, but there is precisely none of the latter on show. Fantasy meets fantasy, and leaves a hole where anything real might sit; all is, sadly, fantasy. This is perhaps what made the experience feel so empty. A counter argument (that has been made many times in the comments sections of online reviews critical of the show) is that this is, obviously, the point. But the fault in that argument seems clear. Dismaland does not critique the present but reproduces its faults in the laziest way, without any of the actual texture and depth of a reality inhabited by actual humans, and so without any of the energy and resistance that spring from that crooked timber. Dismaland lacks precisely any of the utopian energy that suffuses the best dystopian imaginings. I hope that those in the queue found something to tickle them, to make them think, as they wanted. But I suspect that it is not just professional over-exposure to critiques of fantasy life that left this reviewer underwhelmed. Rather, everyone would sense the distance between the moribund cartoons on offer here and the vitality of a genuinely rich dystopian representation that includes humans.
Woolcock’s Utopia was a very different experience. Staged in the Camden Roundhouse, it was both an audio and visual exhibition, the set designed by Block9—famous for creating outlandish constructions for Glastonbury festival. The exhibition was a curated figurative microcosm of the city outside. Entering the space, you are overwhelmed by the enormous centerpiece, a towering mountain of cardboard boxes (the kind used to transport commodities) spectacularly lit from the inside with shifting, phasing colored lights. On each box is branded the name of the product it contains— “desirability,” “respect,” “glamour,” “exclusivity,” “health,” “cool”: “they’re the things we think we’re getting when we buy a product,” says Woolcock. “It’s a temple to consumerism, with nothing inside.” To the right is a kind of production space where the “goods” are made, like a small garment factory containing little nods to The Matrix and Baudrillard. The warren that comprises the whole set is built from these boxes, and we move through them to experience the individual narratives that make up the exhibition.
The stories of individuals from Camden borough, interviewed over months by Woolcock, are told via edited looping narratives played from speakers embedded in tableaux scattered throughout this landscape. These are real lives, lived amongst the spectacular architecture of capital, in the glitter but also the ruins of a real London that is here concentrated, rather than cartoonishly exaggerated. A burnt-out car sits next to a red telephone box plastered with flyers offering sex; building site rubble surrounds a park bench; someone’s cleaner’s uniform sits on a dress-maker’s mannequin; an old man’s walk around the borough is projected onto a small box screen. It is in these juxtaposed narratives that Utopia’s real power resides. As Woolcock captures individuals and their experiences of the world, she creates a map of conflicting lives, ideas, and desires, held together in a landscape of rubble and accident, chance and inescapable consequence. What emerges is precisely what is lacking from Dismaland—the substance of lives lived, and for those lives fantasy is not the core, but rather the pliant mortar that fills the cracks between them, that orders them, spaces them, and shapes them, but which in turn is ordered, spaced, and shaped by the agency and dense texture of the reality of individual lives. In a small alcove a laptop displays a Facebook page leaping with activity, as we hear from Lizzie, telling us about her teenage sex life, its trials and mistakes. Opposite a voice mutters ingredients he used to use to cut cocaine (“rat poison, talcum powder”) when he was a dealer, a young man with an abusive father and broken home. Narratives of working-class kids uncomfortable and ignored in posh schools stand next to middle-class kids who were robbed for their phones and scared to cross into the estates backing onto their affluent streets. But these are surface summaries: the power was in the density of the detail. At the entrance to the main warren of stories, to the left of the main space, a two-and-a-half-minute video on consumerism is projected onto a plastic sheet. Scenes of the Rana Plaza factory collapse blend seamlessly into Black Friday shopping crushes and images of the London Riots. One narrator pinpoints the utopian urge of the latter, skewed by the promises and glamour of commodity culture—these were things they were told they wanted, told they had to have but could never afford. And now they were up for grabs. Woolcock, unlike Bansky, has grasped that utopia is woven of desire, and that the real problem with the present is in the capture of that desire and the construction of an all-too-real false utopia that binds and distorts.
There are nods here to the utopian tradition. In the shadow of the central pyramid of commodified desires is an old-fashioned store-front, a car smashed into the shutter below a sign that reads “T. More & Sons.” Inside is a dusty second-hand bookshop: utopia superseded. Yet behind the pyramid is a rectangle of eight screens, each an individual taking turns to read from More’s Utopia (1516). In that space, after seeing those tableaux and listening to those narratives, the 500-year-old words had a certain ethereal power coming from the mouths (and in the accents) of those eight. Tucked in there behind the pulsing panopticon mound of commodities—out of sight of it—you were left with the sense that the connection between real individual lives and some genuine utopian impulse still survived. Individual lives, defining separate hollows in the false-utopian landscape, still possessed—indeed were the only thing that could possess—the energy and agency to link up again and drive out that which surrounded them.
One final thing that I have not yet touched on: just like Utopia Station before them, Dismaland and Utopia were more than exhibitions. They incorporated spaces for radical political groups, evening events, and politically charged performances. In Banksy’s case, the back-right quarter of the main arena was given over to a few spaces that contained posters, texts, and videos condemning the police state, an exhibition of “radical banners,” and a space to pick up leaflets and information or radical magazines. These were basically seamless with the art, and, whatever this reviewer’s opinion of the actual exhibition, there is no doubt that these tents provided exposure to these ideas—and crucially acted to normalize, even glamorize, them—for a significant number of people who would not otherwise be exposed. How much effect this would have is impossible to quantify, of course, but there is ample sociological research into the process of political radicalization, and the first step always seems to be exposure to and integration into communities that hold these ideals and act on them. Dismaland also hosted club evenings, with politicized bands such as Pussy Riot and Asian Dub Foundation.
In Woolcock’s case, local activist groups such as Sisters Uncut were given evening platforms to speak, mingled with politicized celebrities such as Russell Brand, Charlotte Church, and Owen Jones, lots of slam poetry, and live music. Some of the results can be seen online. Again, it is difficult to imagine the experience being revolutionary, and it is likely that the audience were to a great extent already members of the choir: if not radicals then sympathetic liberals. But again, there is no harm done as such, unless we take the stance that such things are consolatory salves and delay genuine action.
2016 is the 500th anniversary of More’s Utopia, and a number of events, special issues, and exhibitions are planned to mark the occasion. There are at least three curated exhibitions planned in London alone around the theme of utopia. The danger is that they will have nothing of the subversive edge of their namesake, and will end up merely glorified design exhibitions, pointing to how to keep doing what we’re already doing, but in comfier chairs, or with less energy-intensive white goods, or with a “revolutionary” new hot-desking organization for the creative industries. If that is to be avoided, the focus must be on people and the problems they suffer in their daily lives, and it must be on the systems that produce and reproduce those problems. Utopia survived in genre fiction and film for years after it was driven from the mainstream: we might say that the directly critical book one of More’s text was left somewhat by the wayside, while the fantasy construction of book two spawned what followed. Perhaps it is time for book one to be resuscitated and utopianism to stop fighting fantasy with fantasy and to pay more attention to the harsh realities that make capital’s false hope seem so seductive in the first place. —Rhys Williams, King’s College London
Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Conference Report: The 29th SLSA Conference was held in Houston, Texas, 12-15 November 2015. It was well attended and produced engaging and lively discussions around the theme “After Biopolitics.” There were a number of organized panels and roundtables engaging with key biopolitical topics, ranging from contemporary anxieties about extinction and endangerment to exploring the biopolitical apparatuses of biomedicine, multispecies encounters, and ocean ecologies, to projections of biopolitical theory into sensation, affect, and libidinal ecologies. These panels were interspersed with artistic performances and screenings, including short film screenings by Julia Oldham and Jeanne Liotta and a lightshow installation by James Turrell.
There was a particularly strong engagement with questions of animals and biopolitics, as represented by the two keynotes given by artist Mark Dion and philosopher of science Vinciane Despret. Dion shared photos of many of his animal-themed public art exhibits, focusing on jellyfish, bears, birds, and cabinets of curiosity as spaces and species for human-animal relationships. Despret used Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead (1986) as a key text for discussing the troubling and metamorphizing ethical possibilities opened up by organ transfer. As she asserted, organ donation gives vitality to both the living and the dead, creating new networks of obligation and gifting. Both keynotes opened up new lines of inquiry into the animal and the biopolitical as spaces for scientific and philosophical reflection.
Of the panels I was able to attend, I particularly enjoyed a panel discussion of Joan Slonczewski’s science fiction, which featured discussants Bruce Clarke, Stacy Alaimo, Colin Milburn, Dirk Vanderbeke, and Christy Tidwell, along with Slonczewki herself, which followed a talk by Slonczewski on her recent scientific work entitled “Transhuman Evolution in Antarctica.” Another well-attended and engaging panel on posthuman theory called “Who Am Us, Anyway?: The Human Species in a Posthuman Frame” brought together eight prominent critical theorists in a form of theory speed dating, where each participant had a few minutes to explore posthumanism through concepts ranging across secretion, brokenness, relationality, statistics, sex, risk, multiplicity, godhood, microbes, and love. Other papers of note included Joshua Schuster’s presentation on a cultural and natural history of extinction, a group of papers presented by Margret Grebowicz, Dominic Pettman, and Adam Nocek on “Codes and Swarms,” and Miranda Butler’s discussion of Benjaminian messianism in strategies for containing radioactive waste. I only saw one paper that I didn’t enjoy in four days of conferencing, a testament to the high quality of presentations coming out of this academic group.
I am delighted to announce that my colleague Brittany Roberts (UC Riverside) won the Bruns Graduate Essay Prize for her essay “Touching Bare Life in the ‘Corridor of Absolute Dying’: Biopolitics, Necrorealism, and Resistance to ‘Making Life’ in Evgenii Iufit’s ‘Spring.’” The Schachterle Essay Prize, which is awarded to an untenured scholar, was won by Debrapriya Sarkar for her essay “Deforming Tragedy: Animal Life and the Romance of Disruption in The Tempest.” The SLSA Lifetime Achievement Award was awarded to Sidney Perkowitz, and will be presented to him at the forthcoming SLSA conference in Atlanta.
The call for papers has gone out for the two upcoming SLSA conferences. The European Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts will be hosting their annual conference in Stockholm, Sweden on 14-17 June 2016, with the theme of “Control” and featured talks by guest scholars Mieke Bal, Lauren Berlant, Michael Dillon, Alexander Galloway, and Steven Hinchliffe. The 30th Annual SLSA conference focuses on the theme “Creativity” and will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, on 3-6 November 2016. Guest speakers for this conference include Margaret Edson and Darryl Cunningham.—Stina Attebery, University of California, Riverside
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